Annual reviews are often one of those things we do as a box ticking excercise. It’s dull, time consuming and there are often more interesting geeky projects you’d rather be working on.
Words like SMART buzz around our brains for a few weeks and then are promptly forgotten (much like the goals) until the same time the following year when each goal is ticket off as “Done” or “No Longer Relevant”.
Surely there’s a better way?
Let’s look at what SMART stands for…
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time Constrained
Your business may have different words but the jist is the same.
I want you to think about these words differently. Instead of writing goals for someone to achieve I want to think about User Stories. It’s reasonable to demand that any PO writing new features for the backlog should create them so they are Specific, have good Acceptance Criteria, be feasible to implement, be a valuable addition to the software, and should fit into a single Sprint.
In other words SMART is just another way of setting detailed and unambiguous instructions!
So now we know that SMART is simply a way of writing clearly let’s look at what goals you should set.
What do you expect your Team Member to be doing for the upcoming year?
This may sound like an obvious question but in my opinion annual goals shouldn’t all be about Continuous Personal Development or an arbitrary “I’d like to lean that” because these are the first things which will be abandoned when you have a tough day. Instead look at what your department goals are and propagate these through to your team.
If you have a major release coming up then set that as one of the goals. If you need to analyse system performance or memory usage then write it down. What you will find is instead of irrelevant targets which will be abandoned in favour of more pressing work your team will suddenly become accountable for getting the releases out to customers. Not only that, but they will see that their day to day tasks are being used to measure performance instead of the “Nice to Haves” which were abandoned as soon as the year hit a rough patch.
You will quickly find that most developers will much rather have a goal of “Create Offline Sync Mechanism as specified in Feature 123 before the end of January” than something vague like “Improve the Support mechanism”. For one thing there’s a lost less ambiguity as to whether it’s actually been achieved! Remember, less ambiguity means fewer awkward conversations when you come to assess goals, that has to be a good thing!
In conclusion, setting clear (or SMART) goals for your team which actually reflect the work they’re going to be doing day to day is a great way of getting investment in your department’s objectives and helping making those annual review forms much more relevant. Learning goals are good, but they shouldn’t be the core of a Team Member’s assessment.
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