Example: Business Goal Hierarchy
Describe business goals as a hierarchy of desired metrics. Goals that are difficult to measure are decomposed into smaller goals that have objective measures assigned to them.
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Imagine a large furniture store that sells quality furniture at a reasonable price to the very large middle-market. The store's showrooms are attached to a warehouse where customers can pick up the items they have purchased. Alternatively, customers can arrange to have large items delivered. A business goal hierarchy for this company might look as follows:

Diagram shows more complex hierarchy of business goals for a furniture store.

The business goal Reasonable Quality is sufficient to retain existing customers but will not serve to attract new customers. People will not go to shop somewhere because the quality is no less than competitors. People will be attracted to shopping there because prices are lower and it is convenient.

It might have been determined that product quality meets customers' expectations and that no quality improvements are therefore necessary. However, facilities might need to be improved. The business goal Improve Facility Quality might be further divided into things like Sufficient Parking, Clean Restrooms, and Multilingual Signs.

It must be possible to measure business goals; otherwise, they need to be refined further. Prices can be objectively compared to competitors' prices, whereas convenience for customers is very difficult to measure. Therefore, Customer Convenience has been subdivided into Accessibility, Immediate Availability, and Opening Times, which are more concrete ways to measure customer convenience. Opening Times can be optimized, for example, by measuring the number of people in the store during every hour of the day. Accessibility can be (partly) determined by the number of payment methods available to customers. The immediate availability of products is defined by the stock-on-hand, which can be measured by the percentage of back orders directly requested by customers, and the delivery time, which can also be objectively measured.

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