What are the principles of guiding?

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Guiding Principles for Creating Guiding Principles
A Hypothetical Example
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Guiding principles are exactly what they sound like: fundamental guidelines driving an organization, department, or project.

We’re big fans of guiding principles, especially at the project level. Looking back at the guiding principles during a project reminds us why the project exists in the first place. Throughout a project, especially if it’s a long-term ongoing project, it’s easy to lose site of the big picture. They also help us make decisions when two competing ideas are presented. When this happens, referencing the guiding principles can help us determine the right direction to go.

We set guiding principles at the beginning to help get team members on the same page and document why the project exists.

Guiding Principles for Creating Guiding Principles

Defining rigid goals and objectives (think formal SMART goals) for a project is daunting for a lot of people. By using guiding principles, we set the stage for projects without investing unnecessary amounts of time in a formal process. We usually spend around a half-hour documenting, revising, and agreeing upon a project’s guiding principles.

Don’t get me wrong, there is certainly a time and place for more formal SMART goals (yearly company strategic goals, as an obvious example). Guiding principles simply help capture the essence of a project when full-blown SMART goals aren’t an appropriate time investment.

Here’s what guiding principles are to us:

Three to five statements that cover elements of the project like:
- Why the project exists
- What success looks like
- Constraints to work within

A Hypothetical Example

Let’s pretend we’re working with a client on a custom software system to take their proven customer service process and build a web-based customer portal.

Some guiding principles might be:

Decrease end-to-end service time for customer tickets
Reduce the number of calls to the customer service center
Build the system around the existing proven customer service process
Provide the same, or higher, level of service that currently exists

As you can see, these aren’t specific or measurable, but after reviewing this list, a team member would quickly understand the big picture behind the project.

Have questions about guiding principles? Reach out.

From the course: Strategic Planning Foundations

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Guiding principles and goals

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- The last two elements of setting direction for your organization are articulating your guiding principles and your goals. Guiding principles dictate how you want the organization to behave, especially when your leaders aren't around. You're setting out a principle that an associate can use when they're confronted with a situation where they don't know what to do. What lenses do you want them looking through as they're evaluating those decisions? Because if you have clear guiding principles, the actions they're going to take will be consistent with the direction of the organization, which ultimately helps you achieve that vision and mission. In terms of your goals, you're going to set out those metrics, those things that after a year, two years, five years, you'll look back and say, we achieved those goals. Try to make them as measurable as possible. It can be a dollar, how much revenue, how much profit. It can be a number…

Policymakers became aware that the natural water system had to be a 'guiding principle' in physical and spatial planning.

Many teachers searching for a guiding principle upon which to base their schemes of work have found that the elements provide useful headings.

To announce that one idea is the highest guiding principle, and others are oppressive and wrong, potentially gives rise to other forms of oppression.

More precisely, the guiding principle is that fill-in is accepted at locations in the global matrix where the nodes belong to the same finite element.

And why is symmetry considered a strong guiding principle in vowel systems but not in consonant systems?

Throughout, a pressure to maintain bilateral symmetry-by matching pairs of front and back vowels at equivalent "heights"- is taken as a guiding principle.

The guiding principle for this investigation was that any mechanism which adversely affected breathing, fingering, stance, embouchure, or reading music was unacceptable.

In the interviews, the concept of causality is generally used as a heuristic guiding principle.

A second guiding principle for a regional approach is thus the importance of a broad participation of stakeholders involved in the struggle against poverty.

The respondents in our study suggested that effectiveness should also be a guiding principle in drug approval, and several regulatory changes were proposed.

And the well-known dictum 'each word has its own history' will have to be a guiding principle in this endeavour.

The interaction of sound sources and surrounding spaces provided a guiding principle in the conceptual and technical development of the installation.

The recent history of method development is briefly surveyed with an emphasis on the use of geometric integration as a guiding principle.

The one guiding principle for this self is sincerity or authenticity, plus a healthy respect for the autonomy of others to do likewise.

To follow such a policy does not necessarily rest on any acceptance of aesthetic education as a guiding principle.

These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.