Moving Your IT Team From Intentions to Impact 

Why IT Needs a New Way to Talk About Success 

Over the past 20 years, our team has worked with hundreds of IT leaders across industries. Marc and I have sat beside them in strategy sessions, town halls, board meetings, and hallway debriefs with their business counterparts. 

And if there’s one pain I’ve heard repeated more than any other, it’s this: 
“We’re doing a ton of work, but people still don’t see the value of IT.” 

The problem isn’t that IT isn’t working hard. Or even that it’s not delivering. The problem is that the work—no matter how complex, innovative, or essential—is not being communicated in a way that resonates with the business. 

That’s why we introduced a new model for goal setting and outcome tracking in IT: 
Target Achievements and Key Accomplishments. 

What’s Broken With the Way IT Sets Goals 

Most IT organizations still run on a combination of: 

• Annual goals that are too generic to guide execution 
• Project charters written in technical language 
• Portfolio updates no one reads 
• Performance reviews that emphasize individuals’ ideals and efforts

None of this helps a business stakeholder understand: What am I getting from IT that supports my priorities? 

The reality is, the language of IT goals if often either too abstract (“deliver digital transformation”) or too technical (“decommission legacy middleware layer”). Neither builds credibility with stakeholders. Nor helps IT teams feel seen for the real value they deliver. 

Why We Don’t Call Them “Goals” 

We deliberately chose the term Target Achievements instead of “goals” for a reason. Goals in most corporate settings have become synonymous with individual aspirations or HR-driven performance templates. Think: “develop leadership skills” or “drive innovation.” 

Useful? Sometimes. Actionable? Rarely. 
Connected to delivery? Almost never. 

Target Achievements are different. They are grounded in: 

• Planned business-critical IT work 
• Specific outcomes expected this quarter 
• What your stakeholders will notice when this work is successful 

They anchor delivery in accountability—not ambition.  

Critically important, they’re tied to projects, programs, and platforms, which is the unit of execution that defines the real rhythm of IT work. 

And, not least important, we’ve experienced that people respond to “Target” as something to be done, vs “Goal” as something they may or may not make time for. 

The Flip Side: Key Accomplishments 

Of course, accountability isn’t just forward-looking. That’s why Target Achievements are paired with their retrospective counterpart: Key Accomplishments. 

These are not status reports or technical closeouts. Key Accomplishments answer a simple, powerful question: 
What impact was felt by the business because of our efforts? 

It’s not enough to say, “we launched the new system.” We need to be able to say: 

• How much faster is a process now? 
• How many hours were saved? 
• What revenue or risk reduction did this enable? 

This is where credibility is built. And where it’s been missing for too long. 

This Is Not Performance Management 

Let’s be clear: This is not a new way to do HR reviews. 

We’re not replacing your annual performance evaluation. We’re not rating people. And we’re not trying to capture every to-do across the organization. 

What we are doing is helping IT leaders and their teams: 

• Set quarterly intentions that matter to the business 
• Track the real impact of delivered work 
• Create a clear, repeatable rhythm of value demonstration 

This is for the CIO who wants to walk into a board meeting and confidently show what IT accomplished. It’s for the team lead who wants to give credit to their people for work that moved the needle. And it’s for the stakeholder who finally says: “Now I see what IT is doing—and it matters to me.” 

The Role of ImpactIT 

Certainly, we facilitate workshops on this.   We’re happy to provide templates and best practices.  But that’s difficult to scale, and it’s one-off for your team. 

We built ImpactIT as the system that makes this model usable, visible, and sustainable. 

It is a purpose-built solution to help IT teams shift from outputs to outcomes, from tasks to impact, from the work we’re doing to the business value we’re creating. 

Instead of asking teams to reverse-engineer PowerPoint decks every quarter, ImpactIT provides: 

• A structured format for defining Target Achievements 
• A business-friendly template for logging Key Accomplishments 
• A centralized place to track and communicate value 

It’s lightweight. It’s practical. And it’s built to help IT leaders regain control over how their work is understood and appreciated. 

The Bottom Line 

If you’ve ever said, “We need to do a better job telling our story”—this is how. 

Target Achievements and Key Accomplishments aren’t just new terminology. They represent a mindset shift. They’re about what IT is aiming to accomplish, not what individuals are hoping to improve. 

And it starts with a simple question: 
What will your business partners say IT accomplished this quarter? 

If the answer isn’t obvious to them, it’s time to try a different approach.