There's a difference between work getting done and the mission getting better, and anyone who has spent time on the government side of a project has felt it. The team is busy, the reports come in on time, and the analyst at the end of the line is still doing the same manual work they were doing a year ago.
At PVM we've organized our work around closing that difference. We call what's on the other side of it a mission outcome, and since we use the term a lot, it's worth explaining what we actually mean by it and why we think it matters to the people we support.
A mission outcome is a specific, visible change in how the people doing the mission work. It's defined with them, in their own terms, before anything gets built. It's something they can point to afterward and say "this is different now."
That means it isn't a deliverable, a number of hours, or a report about what could be built. A dashboard is a deliverable. Leaders making better decisions in a fraction of the time, because they're working from live data instead of last week's slides, is an outcome. A simple way to tell the difference: describe the result to the person whose work it changed. If they’d recognize their own day in that description, it’s an outcome.
Most of the outcomes we work toward fall into a few familiar shapes. Sometimes it's giving time back to people who were stuck doing manual work, or making a step that used to happen by hand happen on its own. Sometimes it's bringing information out of separate systems into one place, or giving leaders a clearer view so they can decide faster. Every so often, the change is big enough that the team starts working in a fundamentally different way.
Starting with the outcome changes the first conversation. Instead of beginning with how many people a project needs or how long it will take, we begin with what would have to be true at the end for the team to call it a success. That question tends to surface what really matters to the mission, and it gives everyone the same target from day one.
It also keeps the work honest. When the goal is a change in someone's working day, progress is easy to see and hard to fake. If priorities shift halfway through, which they usually do, the team can re-point at what matters now without losing sight of why the work exists.
And it gives our customers something they can stand behind. When someone asks what the project delivered, the answer isn't a list of activities. It's a set of specific changes the team agreed on, worked toward together, and can point to.
Here are a few examples of mission outcomes we've delivered this year:
Each of these started the same way, with a conversation about what would make the team's day better, and ended with something the team now owns and uses.
We'll keep sharing more about how we work toward mission outcomes over the coming months. In the meantime, we'd genuinely like to hear from the people doing this work every day: what would have to be true at the end of your next project for you to call it a success?
PVM is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business and 8(a) firm founded by a retired U.S. Naval officer, and the only small services business in Palantir's U.S. Government Vanguard partnership program. We serve those who serve.