Wooden mannequins pushing puzzle pieces into the right placeA while back, I looked at the SIO model. This month, I have another acronym to share: MOST.  MOST is a bit like SIO, in that it is a way of creating granular levels within an organisation so that you focus on the right type of information for the right type of task.  You can use it within a project to ensure that everything is aligned, and it is also useful at Portfolio or corporate level.



MOST stands for:

 

 





     
  •  
  • Mission




    •  
  •  
  • Objectives




    •  
  •  
  • Strategies




    •  
  •  
  • Tactics.




    •  
  •  

 


As you can imagine, this can apply to pretty much anything and it lends itself very well to setting project structure.



Mission



Start with setting your mission for the project.  What are you doing, in one sentence?  Using a tool like Seavus DropMind can help gather all the ideas and words to then filter out the key messages and form a mission statement.  Mission statements are typically broad, and focus on values.  You might use your corporate mission statement for your project, or there might be a program level mission that you can inherit.



Objectives



Your project only has one mission, but it will likely have several objectives.  What are they?  How will your project be structured to support them, both in terms of project phases for delivery and resources?  These are the goals for your project, which are supposed to tie directly back to helping you achieve the mission.



Strategies



Strategies are how you are going to deliver your objectives.  For example, if the objective is to reduce the cycle time for customer complaints to 3 days, your strategies will be ideas around how to do that.  You may have several initiatives that contribute to meeting that objective.  These could have different workstream leaders or be championed by different departments.



Tactics



At this level you make your strategies real.  These are the tasks required to deliver on all of the above statements.  Where at the ‘strategy’ level items are owned by workstream leaders, here the tasks are allocated to resources who will complete them.



As with any model that has hierarchical layers, the key thing here is that all the levels support and build on each other.  You shouldn’t be working on any project task that doesn’t support a strategy, all the strategies should support the project objectives, and the objective should underpin the mission. This way it is very easy to see how what you are doing contributes to the overall goal.  People feel more engaged and empowered if they understand how their work makes a difference, and this is a good way of showing how everything links.