I guess we all have to do it… that performance review period.
How do you go about finding inspiration for SMART objectives for the year ahead?
What if you don’t know where the year will take you?
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Hi
I fully understand where you are coming from and I’m sure we have all been in this position at some point or another.
Personally, I listen to podcasts or browse through blog articles. Even if it is on topics that I don’t think will interest me, I skim through and end up picking up on things to investigate further. For example, I had never really considered accessibility testing until I read an article on the BBC about colour blind people unable to watch a football match properly due to the colour of the kits.
Now it is one of my focuses this year and I’m banging on the drum about it at work.
I think if you just explore the testing community (or any community depending on what you are setting objectives for) you will find something.
I hope this helps in some way.
Faith
what are you passionate about, its going to be a chore if its something you dont want to improve.
The other way to think about it is what really annoys you which you would change?
maybe kick off an objective to change it?
I have a very structured performance management structure where I work and I need somewhere between 2 to 5 SMART objectives a year. I like to try and create some objectives that solve a problem I currently have, so I get some real benefit other than just the new knowledge. I want to improve myself and learn new things, but I’ve got a very heavy schedule of work just like all of you out there. Since I find myself spending my own time on this then I want some real benefit to make my working life easier out of it.
For instance I’ve been frustrated in recent years about the amount of work I’ve had to trying to gather data from a project I work on that has moved to TFS. There is currently a lot of manual work required to gather various bits of data I need as TFS is not great at giving me what I want through its web interface, and if I go fiddling in the background it can break stuff.
So I’ve set goals to implement a solution in C# that runs queries against the TFS server, and then serves out pages via a web app running on IIS. I’m sure some of this stuff will be bread and butter to some people out there, but its a whole lot of learning for me. Here there is a result I can measure myself against, and at the end of it the burden of maintenance on some current reporting methods will cease.
I’ve asked my leader and also, got together with the leadership team to find out what their priorities are and where they think we are heading.