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this pageHow to conduct an Effective Performance Appraisal
Anything which is not measured , will not be done
The first time when i heard someone make the above statement, I took it with a pinch of salt. I firmly believed that you can't make somebody a great performer by merely measuring his performance. I thought motivation to do a job well, should come from within a person, and external forces didn't have much role to play.
My belief started changing when I went through my first performance appraisal, where I was the appraised. We used to have a yearly performance appraisal, where we had to fill a form before being appraised. I found it difficult to fill many of the questions in that form. In fact I wasn't sure about the expectations of my manager and what would make him happy. While I had trouble remembering what I actually did during my initial months, it was ironic that I need to give my perspective of how well I did the work! I tried to give 'safe' marks to most of the questions and was hoping for the best.
So when I had to meet my manager on my performance appraisal, I was ill prepared to defend my marks and was fervently hoping my manager's memory would be as bad as mine!
However,
during the appraisal I was made to realize one important aspect of the human
memory. Human memory is programmed to remember all the things which it is
supposed to forget! My manager remembered in gory details all the broken promises,
buggy code and delayed releases of products I was involved in. As he highlighted
each of the blunders I had committed during my appraisal period, I started
wondering what actually makes this guy to continue
employ me?
Towards the end of appraisal my manager congratulated me for my immense contribution and hoped that I would continue to do good (!) work. Needless to say, when i came out of his 'chamber', I was a dazed and confused. From what he told during the first half of the appraisal, if I continue to do the same good work, pretty much everyone in the company would have to find a job elsewhere!
That was my first appraisal. After that I generally became better prepared to face future appraisals. During the next year I spent considerable time in jotting down all the good stuff about myself and ensured all my goof ups were appropriately covered. I also tried to catch some of the blunders of my manager, which I thought could be of use during my appraisal. I was eagerly looking forward to the appraisal, determined to outwit my manager this time. But as it happens always in stories, my manager resigned a week before my appraisal. So much so for my preparation.
Well those were the times when I was the appraised. After some years I began to sit on the 'other side' of the table and i thought it would be fun. Contrary to my expectation , it didn't seem to be a particularly rewarding experience either. First and foremost, i never had the time 'to prepare' to face the appraised. Typically I was given only a day's notice to prepare, which wasn't enough.
Also I ended up appraising too many people and often got confused with their accomplishments and failures. Like my manager before me, I also seemed to remember all the wrong things which the appraised had done. I couldn't help noticing that most of the time my appraisal was based on how I felt about the appraised at that moment. If he had done a good job yesterday, I seem to regard him high inspite of the goofups he did four months ago.
Finally, I realized that to do a good job of appraisal you need to have objective data at your desk during the appraisal. You should have studied this data before hand in order to find out the major accomplishments of the appraised and areas where he needs to put in more effort. This data needed to be current.
Having said that, How do you get this objective data which is shared by the appraised and the appraiser alike, which is also current? It is precisely under these circumstances one should try to explore using tools such as Smartworks (download free personal edition from http://www.smartworks.us) which helps you to conduct effective appraisals.
Let us see how an appraised (let's call him John) and an appraiser (let's call her Mary) in an organization can benefit from using Smartworks in conducting appraisals.
Profile
of John (the appraised)
John
has been working as a developer of a software product called 'modasl'. He
has been working specifically on implementing a security manager for this product. The project is
managed using Smartworks-Project Planner
and all review comments , defects during internal testing all are filed under
Smartworks- Smart Tracker.
Besides working as developer, he also works as an evaluator for another product called 'PetSoft'. He has been responsible for finding defects and to document the test plan.
Profile
of Mary (The appraiser)
Mary is responsible as a project manager to deliver the products 'modasl' and 'PetSoft' on time. She has around ten team members reporting to her on various aspects of these two projects. She has to interact with top management, marketing and sales department besides interfacing with the Project team members. She needs to ensure that all projects are executed well within the budget. Again due to her busy schedule, her preparation for an appraisal is restricted to typically less than 30 minutes.
We shall now see how Mary and John can use Smartworks to have an objective and transparent appraisal.
An
Effective Appraisal Scenario
The data pertaining to the performance of John is available under Smartworks. First Mary logs in to 'modasl' project in Project Planner and finds out all the tasks which John is assigned to and the progress he is making by viewing a Gantt chart. As you can see from the figure (Figure 1) below , John seems to have done reasonably well on tasks assigned to him in the project . He has not completed two of the tasks but the remaining tasks are complete for the appraisal period. This should be a good news for both John as well as Mary.
Once Mary is satisfied with the Gantt chart she proceeds to look in to some of the Project Planner graphs which can give her more insight into what John has been doing.
First she chooses a Project Planner graph to find out tasks with respect to team members in John's project. She gets the following figure (Figure 2) which makes it clear that John is the principal developer in the modasl project. (this sure would help her as she needs to know which gloves she needs to wear during the appraisal!). John needs to complete around 15 tasks in the project. He seems to be owning more tasks than the other team members combined. Mary can use this data to check out whether he needs help at this stage of the project.
After seeing the contribution of John in the project, she checks out how timely he is, in finishing the tasks assigned to him. She gets this by invoking a Project Planner Graph which gives her a good picture on how timely John is in completing tasks.
If you see Figure 3, you would realise that John typically completes a task within 5 days after the estimated end date. Also he has never completed any of the tasks assigned to him on time ( interesting!). Perhaps this may point out a problem with John in accepting difficult deadlines. If we look at the graph closely, we see that nobdy else also has completed their tasks on time. This could mean that everyone of them are working on aggressive deadlines and it could be after all a manager's (read Mary's) problem!
For this she can log into the project for which John is the evaluator, through Smart tracker and see for herself how he is performing as a tester. She can choose the total defects by evaluators (which include John) and see how many defects have been submitted by him and how many of them are considered critical by the developers (See Figure 4). It looks like John seems to good in ferreting oput critical defects in the product. However it looks like he has not been actively focussing on minor defects. Mary needs to find out whether this could be because of the fact that John is considering 'minor' defects not worthy enough to report or whether he considers all defects to be critical.
Before meeting John , Mary finally goes through the suggestion box to find out whether John has filed any suggestion or complaint which needs her attention. She invokes the Suggestion box tool and queries for any pending suggestion from John which needs to be looked into. If she finds any pending suggestion, she goes through it and files an appropriate response.
Well,Whatever information available to Mary on John's progress in the various assignments, is also available to John. John ensures that he goes through the relevant performance graphs to get an objective impression on his progress. Both John and Mary are sure that most of the discussions during the appraisal would be centered around the data they had collected through Smart works.
John is sure about what his manager expects out of him. He also knows that even the next time around , he would be measured using the data which is present in Smart works. All he needs to do is to ensure that his graphs looks good for him to climb one more step in the corporate ladder.
Conclusion
I
am sure a transparent, objective appraisal is what everybody wants at the
end of the day. Nobody wants to have an emotional duel during appraisal. Any
tool which helps to do that in whatever way would be a welcome thing for most
managers and employees.
This article is written by R. Devanathan , who is the Project Manager of the team which is involved in the Smart works development. So take some of his views with a pinch of salt! If you have any comments to offer , you can send him a mail at http://www.smartworks.us/htm/feedback.htm