I’m building out yearly objectives for my team, they’ve never had objectives around testing as they have always had pure business objectives around completing projects before. I’m trying to get them to spread their awareness of testing concepts and help them build skills they can apply to improve the wider testing culture. At present they are very much in the mindset of the way they do testing is the only way to do it.
I’ve got some ideas around having ones around learning about Accessibility, Testability, Heuristics and Exploratory testing, but struggling to think of achievable tangible goals.
Trying to bring a bit of excitement into the corporate goals structure… any ideas welcome
In terms of learning what I did was that I presented each member of my team with the areas similar to what you did. And then I presented Shuhari as a level of mastery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuhari
Or you can use the Bloom Taxonomy as the reference.
Then we had what I call guided self assessment. Before the meeting I did an assessment of them on my own. And then during a meeting they did an assessment and when there were a difference we talked about the difference. There were only a few instance where there were a difference that most commonly that is similar to as you said in comparison to the others in the team I am better, where in comparison to other professionals I am still a beginner.
After the assessment we agreed upon a target and a time frame. Like I want to become a Master at Security Testing. Which in my case also meant that they had to use that master to help other teams in the area etc. But then you have a goal in terms of increasing your mastery level.
One of the things I celebrate about my team is how different they are. So setting objectives has to be personal to them. I have regular 121s with them some formal, some informal. So every time I talk to them individually, my objective is to learn something new about them.
I remember in the past I made the mistake in my early managerial career of setting the same objective for my whole team of presenting an area of their expertise to the team…well not all of them were comfortable doing presentations, nor would they be. Their characters were entirely different, so I learnt to embrace that as a strength.
For me their individual objectives are about continuous improvement.
Some objectives I set are based around drawing up measures that focus on quality, effort and timescale thats unique to their projects and their work but getting them to come up with solutions, get team buy in and implement them.
Some objectives are about their ambitions, so if they want to learn something about new skills, giving them the space to do that but ensure they come back to the team and talk about what they found.
These objectives improve the individual, improve the teams results and hence become quite public wins. The last point I would mention is objectives are fluid, I don’t buy in to setting objectives for the year and thats that. Keep talking to your team, extend objectives, remove objectives, add objectives throughout the year. The reality is that some objectives with the best of intentions aren’t helping them and/or the team improve.
Some great points Gary, I agree their goals should be individual and not expect the same from all team members, I also agree with continuous improvement in a direction that the two of you agree is best for them and the team overall
Year long objectives suck, so I’m trying to be as fluid as I can within the structure the company has in place to set a theme for an objective, but the tasks that make up that theme are fluid…
