Manage Your Project Portfolio, 2nd Edition

Derive Your Mission from Your Work

You may find brainstorming difficult. In that case, try using your work to help you define your mission.

Ideally, your organization would have an actionable mission that you could use to help define your project’s or group’s or team’s mission. But even if the organization has a great mission, the levels of managers between you and the top may not have created actionable missions for themselves and their groups. In that case, you’ll have to derive your mission from your work.

Sometimes, you need to use your work to define your mission, as in Make Your Mission Possible [Rot08a]. A colleague explained how he and his group decided their mission when he was tired of his senior management’s apparent lack of direction. ...