I had a fairly average review some years ago when people outside my team thought I was kicking goals. I was frankly stunned at the time!

I had written a white paper describing Web services and WSDL before they were announced. I had pushed into distributed business object design to aid clarity on corporate data and also written a proposal for integration technique that included wrappers on applications to make them compliant with a semantic layer.

These are things we take for granted now there are technologies that commoditise them, but there was nothing like I described back then. When I left to pursue another opportunity, someone senior to me told me quietly that the IT Manager didn’t get me because I was five years ahead of the IT team in my thinking. That was really nice of him, because sometimes we move on without feeling we’ve been able to realize some things we wanted to contribute. It was fortunate the company I went to work for was really excited to have me and I was able to push into these areas and more, traveling internationally for consulting and training.

Sometimes reviews are a stumbling block because of the way a company approaches them, not because of your performance. I remember a friend who was fairly senior telling me years ago that he had a goal of clearing it the bottom 20% of performers each year. That is a similar approach in that it doesn’t consider individual performance: if the whole company is really performing well and you sack the bottom 20% you may be riding yourself of good people!

This is where Organizational Design, clear business processes (with goals and measures) and KPI setting need to be considered. Organizational Performance is only possible with good Organisation Design and Business Process design… and the IT Department will find life a LOT easier in managing applications if the business has its act together in this regard. If you don’t have this kind of clarity, you are undermining your prospects of good performance!