Simplify your goals.
Your company probably has two primary goals: cost and schedule.
Quality is a given. We should be providing at least what the customer expects.
You probably have more goals that you or your department are trying to meet for different reasons, but most of them eventually come back to cost or schedule. Depending on how your company operates, one may be slightly more important than the other.
For example, my team is responsible for supplier quality management systems. On the surface, our goal is supplier quality. But why does that matter?
Because supplier quality problems can shut down production.
So our primary goal is really schedule.
Thinking about it this way simplifies what we do. Instead of treating every activity as its own goal, we can ask a much simpler question:
“Does this improve schedule?”
If it doesn’t, why are we doing it?
Simplifying the goal makes it easier to decide what actually matters.