POP Center Tools Implementing Responses to Problems Page 4

The Planning Process

Matching Project Goals and Objectives

The purpose of goals and objectives is to define the initiative. They state the end result to be sought and set out what is to be achieved along the way. You can also use them as a reference point for checking that the initiative remains on track, by ensuring that the undertaken activity is conducive to meeting the goals and objectives. The following section looks at goals and objectives in turn.

Goals

Ideally, a project goal should specify the problem to be tackled. While this sounds obvious, all too often projects fail to specify a goal, or specify it in terms of the activity to be undertaken rather than the problem to be solved. Examples of this might be "to undertake a project to target prolific offenders," or "to undertake a project to build youth shelters in local parks." The problem with these process-oriented approaches to specifying goals is that they can be achieved without having any impact on the problem they set out to address. For example, a project aimed at targeting prolific offenders with enforcement activity and intensive support may be successful in the sense that it has identified the right people and engaged them in enforcement programs and support, but may not change their individual offense levels. In such circumstances, the project has successfully delivered its intervention, but has failed to affect the problem. From a POP perspective, you should view such projects as failures, since the problem persists.

Goals should therefore be problem-oriented, specifying the problem that will be addressed. Specifying a clear, problem-oriented goal in this way can help to prevent "mission creep," in which a project that originally sets out to address one problem subsequently has other issues added to it. A clear project goal should therefore help to maintain a focus.

A clear statement of the problem leads to a clear goal. For example, when the problem is understood to be "vehicle crashes caused by excessive speed," one would expect the goal to be "to reduce the number or severity of vehicle crashes," not "to increase enforcement of speeding laws," nor even necessarily "to reduce speed." Clarity in the goal enables sensible adjustments to the response plan if one particular response does not appear to be effective. So, in the vehicle crash example, if enforcing speeding laws does not appear to be reducing crashes, you should try a response other than enforcing speeding laws, before the project is deemed a failure.

A word of caution is in order about setting quantified targets, whether internally or externally imposed. Examples of such targets might include to reduce the area's extent of vehicle crime by 15 percent, or to reduce the rate of violence against the person to the national average. However, there is the question over how such targets are set. These are often based on a professional judgment about what can be achieved. Often they are simply imposed by funding organizations. They are seldom based on careful data analysis. However, failure to meet targets can demoralize staff involved in delivering a project, even if the project has nonetheless achieved other positive (yet unmeasured) outcomes.

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of targets is that they generally fail to take into account the counterfactual. Yet this is extremely important in POP initiatives. The fact that a project meets its outcome target does not necessarily imply success if you expected to achieve a greater reduction (based on what has been achieved elsewhere). Furthermore, failure to achieve the project outcome is not necessarily a negative result if you actually expected to achieve a worse result. To illustrate this point, a recent evaluation of the U.K. Arson Control Forum's New Projects Initiative estimated that the combined effect of 19 arson reduction projects was an 8 percent increase in deliberate primary fires. 21 However, this was a much better performance than in a series of comparison areas, which witnessed a 27 percent increase in deliberate primary fires. On this basis, the program was shown to be very cost-effective, yet if a simple arson reduction target had been used, the program would have appeared a failure.

Objectives

While goals should be outcome- and problem-focused, objectives should be output- and intervention-focused. They should specify what you are actually going to undertake as a response, and preferably how much you will undertake. For example, a project goal may be "to reduce thefts from vehicles in an area," while two objectives may be "to provide an additional 100 hours of high-visibility patrol in hot-spot areas" and "to notify all vehicle owners who leave items on display in their vehicles." Although people often use such terms as "goals," "objectives," and "targets" interchangeably and with much confusion about the proper distinction among them, it is mainly important to bear in mind the need to distinguish between what you are trying to achieve (the purpose of the initiative) and how you are trying to achieve it (the means toward the end).