How do you document your impact at work?

When it comes to career development and advocating for yourself at the time of performance reviews, experience has shown me two things:

  1. It’s not what you’ve done, it’s what you’ve documented
  2. You need to start early and document continuously

In an effort to learn from these experiences, I’d like to start gathering such documentation. But how? I’ve been not been very good at advocating for myself in the past, so I’d love to know how you go about documenting your impact at work / gathering evidence ready for review time.

And if you’re on the “power” end of such reviews and promotion decisions, what kind of proof do you need to see that someone has made an impact?

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Hi there!
Why exactly do you need to document your impact at work? Do you have any examples of what you documented to showcase your impact?
Frankly speaking, I rarely have documented anything regarding the mentioned purposes. In a company, there might be an established system, policies for performance reviews so you have goals, criteria, metrics, etc you just need to get done particular stuff that will be clear in such cases, add some comments maybe, and somehow formally check that you have done some expected stuff in time. If you don’t have such a system in your company a performance review may become quite chaotic and subjective and your documented evidence of impact may play no role in your performance review. So again, stuff should be pretty clear and noticeable so you won’t need even to explain a lot because your manager and team will know about your performance and achievements. Anyway, there might be mixed cases and complicated situations, unprofessional reviewing managers, misconducted performances review approaches, etc, and maybe for some situations it makes sense to gather some documentation while in others it is very informal with no artifacts needed

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I think that reflecting on our accomplishments and writing it down - is a great tool. I used brag document (similar to what Julie Evans showed).

But now, we have brag document inside our HR system.

So we are sending weekly reports to our manager, highlighting what have been accomplished during the week, what we are going to do next week and any thoughts or suggestions.

At first glance it looks like a bit stressful to write such reports, but for me, it provides three benefits:

  1. It’s a great tool to reflect on the weekly tasks.
  2. It’s a handy tool to compile your accomplishments before performance review. You just need to look through reports week by week and collect key points that you wanna highlight in the end of the year.
  3. It’s a wonderful tool to advocate yourself and show your visibility.

Additionally, apart from brag document, you need to show your work to the team. Any improvement or a win - should be properly presented.

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I don’t think the work has to be documented. It could also just reach the right ears so you grow as a good employee on some person’s mind.
It goes along the same line that testers don’t know how to talk about what they are doing.
For me what worked was colleagues or managers saying out loud to others how great I did for some task or an initiative or an investigation.
Eventually, these end up with the higher management if the people are transparent and there’s an open communication culture among peers.

Additionally, I note down things I’ve done or achieved during the day in my notebook. The more interesting ones I’d highlight to others casually or as a reporting mechanism every couple of weeks.
Several times per year I try to look back and draw some conclusions, they can end up in my resume, or a personal pile of achievements.

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Reputation
For me reputation rather than documentation did the work. What I did, viewed by others. Also my process improvement projects and so on, above my normal line of work. I certainly think that reputation is more powerful and useful for other things.

I did notice a couple of issues with that thought. The first was already covered, that I do document a few things to remember them for review or add them to a resume later.

I’ll add a second: situations I can imagine where ensuring that information is more rigidly documented is a good idea. A co-worker that steals your ideas and presents them as their own. A difficult boss who judges you based on things other than your achievements. Loud meetings where it’s difficult to be heard.

I have some advantages in being seen as capable by others. I’m educated, with a positively-viewed accent in fluent English, white, male, and above average height. I have a voice that can become loud if I force it to. I’m shy and have trouble with social engagement, but I’m also outspoken about testing and happy to share what I know. I also get staff on-side with me and show that I’m working to make them look good, so that I can get leverage for process improvement, which has the side-effect of making me look competent as people who like you will speak of your talents more freely. I think that all works considerably in my favour. I try to use these advantages to make testing better for both the company and the testers. I also benefit personally from them.

I think that’s worth mentioning that for a whole bunch of reasons. Not just for people who may struggle more to prove their existing talent but for people who review, interview or otherwise judge other employees, to keep that judgement more level, to give space to the shy and quiet, time to the ESL speaker, and look beyond the immediate and cosmetic. Just to keep that in check during meetings and reviews.

Documentation
When it comes to documentation I make a lot of notes because my memory is not very good and I’m subject to a lot of anxiety attacks where I get mixed up. I also break down a problem better when I write, I think it’s my rubber duck. My session notes during testing end up as PDFs which I store in bug tracking. I’ll store notes locally also, even if they’re not required on the story. This gives some indication of what I did and why I did it. I also keep scans of notes from talks, lectures or courses, or type them. Everything in OneNote is generated with a date/timestamp and I can add more, so if I need to claw back through what I’ve done I can do that.

I try to only document what I need to, as it’s a cost. So it’s worth knowing what’s going to be in the review so that you can collect what you need to prove what you need to prove. You have to account for the inevitable gaps and failures in the review system, and being prepared sounds like a good idea. Or at least will reduce wasted effort.

I find that a good move is to mention a new idea or project, then pull out a sheet of paper with details or a diagram and point to it. For some reason talking as if it’s performative then pulling out proof has been impactful. I think people are impressed by the reveal and remember it. Or the level of preparedness, perhaps.

Learning to talk about testing, and understanding a little of how the company operates internally, and a few things about management helps, I think. Being conversational in the domain languages of the land.

Then there’s presentation. People react to how people look and talk more than the content of what they say, which is hard to understand anyway. Being clear and concise and using positive language I think is one way to boost the content of what you say. The design, if you will. How to get what you want to be heard to be heard in the way you want it to be heard.

Hopefully that sparks some ideas, at least.

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I do an annual plan for things I want to learn and accomplish and try to track my progress. At the end of the year I do a retro on what got completed. I’ve used this info in annual work reviews (as my workplace values growth and professional development, your mileage may vary). As for documenting workplace achievements, those are usually pretty self-evident - there should be artifacts for all the projects you’ve worked on.

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To be honest, I’m hoping it’ll prove itself to be unnecessary, but I’d rather have something and not need it than need it and not have it, as has been the case in the past. I just started at my current company a month ago, so I’m really not sure what their review process is like. I’ve already asked my boss, “when it gets to x time, how will I know whether I’ve done a good job?” so we will discuss it. I’d still like to be proactive though.

I’m not very good at humble bragging, so I struggle to know what kind of things to document, tbh. The strongest idea I have at the moment is to collect all the good feedback I’ve had from people, so I can refer to it in a centralised space, as opposed to having to remember about or search for it. A lot of my impact tends to be stopping bad things from happening, which I feel is kind of difficult to “prove”.

What kind of measures do you normally have to support your making a positive impact?

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A brag document is exactly what I need! Thanks for this and sharing the link. It’s given me some good ideas to get started with.

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Yeah, my approach so far has really just been to concentrate on doing good work. But I’ve found that even if my boss is super aware and supportive, other people might still need to be convinced, and without something tangible to show, general good sentiments don’t go that far, which I guess is fair. Not everyone can know the details of everyone else’s work. This is also where I’ve really found that making your work visible is super important, but again not something I’m that great at, as I tend to highlight other people’s achievements over my own. This part seems kind of like a “game” or “office politics” to me, which I don’t like, even if you could argue that’s not really what it is. I guess it makes me uncomfortable, and that’s what I’m trying to combat and improve upon. I’m also trying to showcase more of my own work during team demos and such.

A personal pile of achievements is a great idea. And thanks for the reminder about the CV! I always forget to collect stuff for that.

I think it’s the “viewed by others” part that I need to work on. I tend to keep achievements and positive feedback to myself to an extent, and I’d like to make my work more visible. I’m hoping this kind of documentation would be part of that.

Great points about the things that work in your favour. I definitely think that generally having a good relationship with people helps. Although I have also found that, when it comes to peer reviews for example, a lot of people just aren’t good at giving feedback, and we don’t tend to teach it. So even if someone has informally praised you, formally doing it at review time somehow doesn’t translate as well. That’s part of why I want to keep a collection of informal feedback as well.

Yes, I definitely want to get information about what’s going to be in the review as early as possible. I just started at my company a month ago, so it’s early days, but I don’t want to wait and then be disappointed.

Yes, that’s definitely given me some ideas. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.

I guess a big part of it for me is that I simply don’t remember. There’s so many things I’ll get involved in, and I’m very much a “we” person rather than an “I” person, so I tend to play down my part in things. That’s something I want to improve on. An end of year retro is an interesting idea. Again, it’s the memory that gets me though, which is why I’d like to have some ongoing documentation.

So I’ve struggled with this, more so now than ever before since I’ve become the Quality Architect for my place. Here is a couple things I’ve found to have helped.

Number of Emergency Responses required before my changes compared to after. My company was pretty new to a testing first approach so when I pushed for it we not only saw our Emergency Responses go down, but our number of deployments increase. So more work with less problems.

MTTD/MTTR or Mean Time to Detection and Mean Time To Resolution.
Do we have the right observability in place to detect problems. Do we have the right logging to figure out and solve the problem? Lower times means better client experience and we’re finding issues before they become major.

Defects vs Bugs.
How are testers doing? Did we implement a new process, or how’s the health of our automated tests and are they doing what they should be doing? So we try to aim for a 90/10 split. We should be finding 90% of all problems before our clients report it. Our rule for that is if it’s affecting clients it’s a bug anything is considered a defect. We were pretty rough at documenting defects but now we have a larger push for it so I’m waiting to get concrete data on this one.

Business Impact.
This one can be tricky depending on your place of work. If I have an emergency response that means clients aren’t able to use our system. So that means X number of things are not happening so what does that look like monetarily? How much money did we lose (or gain) from not catching an issue compared to having caught the issue before the clients?

Time from Testing to Deployment?
What can we do to become more confident and do less testing. Automation helps here, so for me it means we’re either not automated the right things, or we’re not trusting of the automation. Lets say your average test time is 5 days. You make some changes and now you’re testing time is down to 3 days. That’s a major increase and means you’re deploying more things. But this is tricky and will need to be compared to emergency responses. If we lower the test time but the responses go up. Means we’re missing something. But if both go down. We solved a problem somewhere.

on the “power side” of things as I do a lot of interviews now. If you come to me saying you’re awesome at your job, one of my first questions is going to be. How have you helped the greater community (at your place of work)? What’s your mentoring like, who have you mentored, what success came from it? This is because I hate the hero mentality. “I’m awesome cause I know it all” okay but our business isn’t about your skills, it’s about the team and growth. So how have you helped others grow.

I hope that helps or gives you an idea of some things. And remember you’re awesome, let others see how awesome you are

Thanks, Sean. You’ve shared some really good ideas that have gotten me thinking about measurements, and what would be useful in my team’s context. The insight from the “power side” is really helpful too.

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If you are good at testing, quality speaks in your favor more than any document.

Still, when it comes to documentation you can document a few things that you can showcase at the time of the appraisal or promotion meeting:
You can document the process that you implemented and how it brings efficiency to the testing process
You can document your achievements like certifications or courses you did alongside your side and how it helps you in your professional growth at your place
You can also document the strategy that you followed while handling any critical issues.
You can document the testing you followed for your projects and how it helps in ensuring the quality of the project.
If you are into automation testing you can share your test metrics also like how much test coverage you did and how much time was saved with your script.

The main purpose of documentation is to ensure that you don’t forget anything about yourself when you are asked to share your accomplishments. The environment in the room makes us feel nervous, and we already know that no matter how well we have performed they are still going to find flaws in us so we have to document everything so that we don’t miss any of our accomplishments as these are the things that showcase what we did the whole year.

Also, documenting the number of bugs reported or closed won’t be significant because the moment you share these numbers, your leadership will share the defect leakage number which will more harm us.
So focus on anything and everything that enhances your testing process.

And if you are documenting something I would suggest focusing on the comparison, that what were your professional goals for the year at your workplace and what you have achieved so far.

I share the perspective of @ipstefan and @kinofrost.

IF I had to provide some evidence of my impact, I would go through the Git history of our project and gather all commits which are fixes of bugs I raised.

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That seems like a lot of work! Any particular reason you’d go down that route?

What about ways in which you contributed that didn’t involve existing buggy code being fixed?

As I would pick just some days as examples, I would not consider it to be much effort.
I would take it as a reliable base from which I can a story of my contributions. E.g. I had with a dev 4 rounds of fixing and testing until a problem complex was gone, which resulted in 4 commits I could easily examine.

Maybe my expression was too exclusive, I just meant this as a way where my influence was visible in the for history.
Other than that I would do it like @kinofrost and @ipstefan.
As I’m currently applying for jobs, I have some stories of my influence at hand. I just don’t documented them heavily. Especially my boss knows them as he was part of it. E.g. I proposed for our daily to move a away from the 3 questions and try Walking The Board. Which turned out to improve communication, progress and the shared vision heavily.
I just don’t have a specific document where I note that on detail. The impact was heavy enough to be rememberable.

How do you come to this?
My experience is more of the opposite.

Also I see my self able to tell good stories (based on facts, not lying) about my testing being able to convince people I resonate with.

I don’t want to work with people who want to see my impacts documented. Either we build a reliable relation or not at all.
I assure them to tell the truth while I also good in such conversations.

I think it would be great if we could all work for people who would actively recognise our good work and commitment. In reality, I think that’s rarely the case. Even if you have a good manager, I think actively recognising - and rewarding - people’s good work isn’t one of the first things managers put effort into. And even if your manager is the best out there and advocates for your success, they’re very unlikely to be the sole decision maker regarding your career progression and pay. There are other people who perhaps work directly with very few people, yet have the final say on the fates of almost everyone in the company.

To be honest, I’ve been burned by many false promises and poor excuses, and now I’m on more of a “mission” to advocate for myself and let people have as few excuses as possible. I think certain people may benefit from more privilege in the workplace and not have to concern themselves with such things.

But to be clear, I’ve barely started my new role, so I’m still to see how things play out here. Whilst I don’t want to carry too much of my old baggage, I also don’t want to be too trusting and end up in the exact same situations as before, which is why I want to set myself up for success from the start.

Regarding story telling, I’ve been told and can see how I tend to play down my part in successes. I tend to take much more responsibility for team failures than I do for individual success. That’s something I’d like to change, and I think proper documentation helps with that.

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I agree, and I think that the political part of work is one of the most infuriating.

I’ve taken a little time thinking about self-documenting and I realise that it has a lot of importance to me.

I think documenting work may do something for you that it does for me, in making your progress and effort feel visible. I often feel like I’m not doing enough or nothing’s getting done or things will take much longer than they actually do, and having the data to dispute my own emotional take on my work can be very helpful in negotiating my value with myself. Perhaps it will help you to celebrate your own efforts and successes.

I also can sometimes take criticisms very personally and spend a long time self-analysing and self-questioning before evaluating to see if that criticism is valid or supported or comes from a place of honesty and clarity. Even criticism that is not given directly to me. I have lost sleep. Sometimes people criticise out of fear or frustration and having artefacts that remind me that actually I do useful things for good reasons is very important to me. Being a support is critically important to my wellbeing. Probably overly so. So supporting my own mental health can mean reviewing my work to show the effort and time and thought I put into something, giving myself evidence against accusations I level at myself, especially when fuelled by accusatory comments.

Plus, it’s useful to review previous work to help guide work that covers the same areas and themes.

I tend to leave a trail of evidence behind because I think better when I write. I suppose I hadn’t considered everything I use it for.

Perhaps being seen to write notes and collect evidence discourages anyone who would try to take advantage of the tacit nature of the internal structure of testing, or stop a reasonable person from mistaking someone with little external structure for someone with no structure. Presenting evidence, making reports, all things that show a person to be on top of the facts. Maybe that has an impact on others.

And if you can find value in it beyond proving your value on demand, then it can better outweigh its own cost. It does for me, and I didn’t realise it until now.

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