Examples of Both Good and Bad Objectives:

Accomplish a manned lunar landing and safe return of astronauts by the end of the 1960’s for a cost not to exceed 20 billion dollars.

A model for a good top-level objective. With the clarity and simplicity of this single objective statement, NASA was able to successfully complete the most technically challenging project in history up to that time.

Explore the ocean floor for oil resources.

Fine if you like work for work’s sake, and if a contracting organization is being paid for it, they do! What is the expected outcome or deliverable? You might get nothing for your expenses except an invoice for a failed exploration, without even an analysis of why the exploration failed.

Complete the design and development of a new user friendly accounting system within 14 months for a cost of 140,000 euros without contracting work to vendors.

The problem here isn’t the constraint about not using vendors – that may well be a valid business constraint. The problem is that we don’t know what “user-friendly” means. This will take some more evaluation before it is a clear objective. Another problem might be the phrase “design and development” – it says nothing about deployment or support of deployment. You need to be more specific when writing the project scope.