Bob Lewis's IS Survival Guide ↑

11.65.1.1 Good mission statements

Good missions, and Mission Statements, exclude alternatives. Useless ones try to express everything you might ever want to do.

“We develop or install high-quality software” has no place in a Mission Statement, for example, because what other choice might you have expressed? The alternatives:

• We develop or install mediocre software.
• We develop or install awful software.
• We refuse to develop or install any kind of software.
• We’d really like to develop and install software, only we’ve forgotten how.

All are non-starters. Because the only statement you can make about software is that it will be high quality, don’t waste the paper and toner.

Next: Useful and Extensible