As Jim Benson and I discover daily when we assess the previous day's progress on our shared personal kanban, frequent retrospectives are invaluable for any working group. By moving each other's tasks from "Complete" to "Archive," we are afforded the opportunity to:
reflect on the previous day's output
orient the course of our current work
celebrate "Yay You!" or "Yay Me!" milestones
address those "This didn't work and here's how we can fix it going forward" moments
Thanks to AgileZen, our personal kanban has become indispensable. In its absence, I could hardly remember what we did last week, and certainly not with much accuracy. This got me thinking how the value of personal kanban extends to the dreaded self-assessment / performance evaluation process.
To be sure, the concept of an annual review is fundamentally flawed. In any situation, continuous feedback is always preferable to having one conversation at twelve or even six month intervals. Within the organization, valuable coaching moments are squandered when retrospectives in the form of evaluations are held months after the fact. There is more potential in correcting actions - and more impact to rewarding them - when the event is fresh in people's minds, rather than waiting and depending on their degrading memory of it.
Especially in today's economy, with an overwhelming number of positions facing elimination and even entire departments threatened by downsizing, the ability to qualitatively and quantitatively justify the existence of your job is crucial. More than ever, it is up to the individual to advocate for that raise, bonus and / or promotion. Rather than "tell" your supervisors that you rock, you have to "show" them exactly why you are a performance superstar.But how can you do this when you have only a vague recollection of what your actual accomplishments are and nary a memory of the obstacles you faced?By leveraging personal kanban as a prompt, past responsibilities and deliverables are easily recalled and cited, particularly if you are color-coding tasks / story cards by project or even skill.Your goal here is to present the clearest picture possible of measurable performance, so try annotating your kanban cards with reminders of:
the challenges you faced
the value creation your performance brought to your team or client
the net value to the organization (lowered costs, reduced inefficiencies, etc.)
other information you or your organization might value
Likewise, your archived items can also assist in:
justifying resources needed
establishing a development plan
identifying the following year's goals
In an upcoming post, the value of personal kanban will be explored from the performance evaluator's standpoint.Photo by Tonianne.