Some thoughts on performance reviews/ratings/rankings for Agile Teams:
If your company insists on annual goals, establish a team goal that carries
more weight than the individual goals -- say 60% team/ 40% individual as a
starting point.
Consider teaching the team how to rate themselves. In spite our worst fears,
most teams don't inflate their own grades--unless the system drives that
behavior.
As for the individual year-end conversation, here's how I like to handle it.
Have a conversation with each person in your group about how the year has
gone. Discuss questions like these:
What were the major events of the year?
What have been the major accomplishments?
What new skills have you acquired?
What have been your struggles?
What contributed to those situations?
What insights do you have, looking back on the year?
What are you most proud of?
How does this inform us going into next year?
What do you want to do better?
Are there new areas you want to explore?
What skills or capabilties will you develop?
How can we build developing those capabilities into daily work?
How will we tell you're making progress?
***Do not discuss a letter or number rating or ranking. Just talk.
***Have a separate conversation about salary increases.
And some thoughts on why appraisals, ratings, and ranking are not helpful:
For most teams, each person's achievement is all intertwined with the other
members of the team. Trying to pull out individual performance on project
goals is futile. Emphasizing or rating individual performance undermines
collaboration.
Individual skills are only part of the performance equation. The quality of
management and the environment for success are major factors in individual
performance. But most rating and ranking schemes ignore those factors.
Ranking people with different skills sets against each other makes no sense.
Yeah, I know lots of companies do it, but the fact that lots of companies do
it does not make it a good idea.
Rating on the bell curve is ranking in different dress. The bell curve isn't
particularly useful in a small population - like the size of a typical
workgroup.
Rating and ranking engender competition, not collaboration.
Most people believe they are above average performers. Disabusing them of
this notion does not improve morale, nor does it spur people on to greater
efforts. Quite the opposite.
And if everyone is doing their job reasonably well (and if managers are
doing their jobs, they are, or they've moved on...) does it help to tell
them they're at the bottom of the heap? I think not.
Performance reviews aim for objectivity, but in almost all cases, they are,
in fact, subjective.
Year end is a lousy time to tell people how they're doing. It's too late --
why waste weeks (or months) of inadequate performance? The best time to let
people know how they are doing is in the present, as close to the event as
feasible.
Esther Derby
Esther Derby Associates, Inc.
612-724-8114 www.estherderby.com
**Secrets of Agile Teamwork PUBLIC workshop: June 5-7, 2007**
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2007 9:53 AM
Subject: [scrumdevelopment] Re: Performance Reviews
Post by David H.Post by dbshapcoGoogle didn't yield much on this topic, so I'd be interested in
experiences others have had in integrating performance reviews with
Scrum -- given that the corporation in question is large enough that
there is little flexibility in the performance review process. The
performance review process is otherwise typical.
Just out of curiosity. why do you say that? There is no organization
which is not capable of change. The speed of change might be
different, but everyone and every organization can change. However you
need to _be_ the change you want to see happening.
-d
This is a very large company with a standard performance review
process. Any real change gets rolled out to thousands of employees --
many who are not practising Agile.
It's just a framework in which we must work that imposes some
constraints. Of course there's always wiggle room, and local
management is on board with integrating Agile with performance reviews.
Management is new to Agile (and therefore Scrum), I've practised Scrum
before but never integrated it with performance reviews.
Someday we might promote this as a best practise and bend some ears up
the management ladder, but the first step is to establish a practise
to begin with. I'd like to leverage best practise elsewhere in
establishing our own.
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