How do you document your impact at work?

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21

Thanks Cassandra, I now understand your perspective better.

I have this problem too. Especial being the only tester in Scrum team and others not carrying that much for testing (more for the outcome than the details).
As I will soon change my job too, Ill reconsider my position on this topic.

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22

I use logic and common sense usually :slight_smile: I don’t want to collect all minor stuff and achievements and positive feedback in detail, etc accumulating tons of formal docs/notes with my achievements, I can do it only if there is a particular process, and system in place. well-known rules, etc in the company for the performance reviews then “I play this game according to the established rules”. In other cases (the majority of my experience), your boss/leader/manager understands the values of testing and QA and sharing the same common sense with you, or they don’t, in both situations your list of “achievements and positive feedback” won’t be useful. Speaking about promotion and especially salary rise, if they have the budget for this (some spare money that they can’t spend somewhere else) they will spend it on you, if not you won’t get anything even if you have really impressive achievements. I follow simple logic being professional and doing my job well trying to use opportunities to really improve something and help businesses achieve their goals, it’s simple stuff that shouldn’t be as you described. But it depends, of course :slight_smile: if your approach works for you - great, mine works for me, but maybe not for others

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23

That’s a very fair point, and something to keep in mind, in terms of managing expectations.

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24

In my workplace it doesn’t work in a way where documenting our impact/work would influence the performance review in any way.
Throughout a year, I like to provide summaries of my work at sprint demo meetings to showcase what I have been up to and what our “bug performance” has been.
For some larger topics, I’m usually so invested in them that my manager gets constant updates from in one on one discussions.
When the year end comes though, I just pick the major things that we worked on and discuss my impact on them with my manager. Another tip is to talk more about your work and your past year’s work when the time for performance reviews is near :sweat_smile: . Some managers make reviews based on what happened in the short term rather the long term!

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