Guide for career progression – 3Ps process – Part THREE – Practice hard

On March 2, 2009, in Career thoughts, by Swapnil
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Practice hard – become a key player

In the last two posts about my guide to career progression, I wrote about how you can sense opportunities and prepare yourself for getting into grove.

The next step obviously is to get yourself involved in the project work and become a key player in the project. Now, understanding the term key player is very important to successfully complete this phase.

When I mention key player, I essentially mean that a person should be,

  • Self reliant on any project related work
  • Should be highly dependent & technically very very good on the job
  • Should be able to provide Solutions to the problems
  • Should have in-depth knowledge about the project & surroundings

Being self-reliant is achievable if you actually work really hard to understand the project, learn the project goals and start aligning your own short term goals according to the same. As I say,

Working hard is very very important, working smart is even more !

Becoming key player not only makes you an important person within the project but also makes you more dependable and reliable in terms of gaining the mileage out of your managers. I always emphasize on showing the results rather than just showing your work hours. Showing the work hours does not always help, unless your work demands so.

I expect a period of about 6-8 months again, for someone to become a key player in the project. Mind you, its not easy task to do so. You have to always show eagerness to learn new things, respond to changes & show your capabilities while on the road.

One thing I mentioned in my last post in this series (here) was to Show and prove  that you alone can carry on the project and make the project dependant on yourself. This is a very very important thing in this phase and important exit criteria. Unless you can show your worth to the project, there is a little chance that your work will be noticed and considered worth its efforts by your management. (Sorry to disclose this tip though !)

Some important tips you can remember on the way to become key player are,

  • Show your worth in the project and show results
  • Take initiatives, implement technical solutions to common problems
  • Work smarter and save efforts by automation of routine tasks
  • Keep in mind that results matter, not the hours you burn
  • Achieve efficiency in the process and show benefits to management & customers
  • Be noticed each time !

If you can achieve this and become a key player in the project, it makes things lot easier for making yourself ready for the next phase in your career. As I said earlier, its not easy and probably not achievable without frequent discussions and re-aligning the short term goals with your manager. It is important to keep your manager aware of your progress, your short term goals and how you are able to help the project by your work !

Will write about the final phase probably in next couple of days as and when I get time to put things together. Till then, cheerio !

This is a series of FOUR posts on Guide for career progression – 3Ps process.  Other posts on this could be found below.

Part ONE – Overview
Part TWO – Prepare yourself
Part THREE – Practice hard, become a key player
Part FOUR – Pass it on & progress

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Guide for career progression – 3Ps process – Part TWO – Prepare yourself

On February 26, 2009, in Career thoughts, by Swapnil
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Prepare yourself

In any job you do, it is very important for you to set up your own goals. Unless you are clear on where you want to go in your career and what your objectives are then most probably you would end up being wood floating on a river.

So, set yourself goals. Realistic, achievable and most notably demonstrable goals, where you could show the output to your managers and peers. It always helps to have, as I said, realistic goals that could possibly achieved in a short term (3-6 months) and long term (2+ years). 

One thing that you should keep in mind while setting goals is the fact that unless your goals satisfy two prime criteria. They are,

  1. Does it benefit your project / organization?
  2. Can that give you a value or a weight in your performance report?

Ok, once you have made your mind clear on the goals then the first and foremost thing you should do is to set the ball rolling by starting to work hard (read smart) in your project and demonstrate that you are absolutely keen and dedicated to the cause of the project (and organization).

Few actions you would like to note are,

  • Understand the project quickly
  • Be a good team player and a listener
  • Help others in the team
  • Demonstrate good results in the project and be dependable
  • Show you can carry out the project on your own shoulders (secret tip – read it as make the project dependant on you) !

Typically you expect to get ready to move into 2nd gear of your progression over a period of 6-8 months.  Once you have have met all above, you are ready to step into the next step and take more challenges on board.

Will write about the step two, in my part three sometime over next few days, so keep an eye here!

This is a series of FOUR posts on Guide for career progression – 3Ps process.  Other posts on this could be found below.

Part ONE – Overview
Part TWO – Prepare yourself
Part THREE – Practice hard, become a key player
Part FOUR – Pass it on & progress

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Guide for career progression – 3Ps process – Part ONE – Overview

On February 26, 2009, in Career thoughts, by Swapnil
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I have been wanting to write about this since a long time, however it took a real long time for me to think appropriately and make my mind on what I should post here. Well, finally I have tried to consolidate few thoughts in my mind about this and putting them here for you all to read / think and if you feel, act on them.

The progress of one in his career is as dependent on hard work, luck as you identifying the right opportunity, sensing chances and making your moves at the right time. The more you move up in the corporate chain, the more it makes things competitive and tougher to break.

In my relatively moderate experience and what I have seen around me, I have tried to devise the progression from one level to another into three step process, which if you work upon, and provided you identify opportunity, sense chances and make your moves at the right time, could help you progress in your career.

Now, before I move on the steps and uncover you the secret, I may warn you that this may not be obviously applicable in all possible cases and all possible job types. My little brain has worked only in the IT sector where you have typical organizational hierarchical structure to deal with and most importantly, you are interested in growing yourself up in the corporate ladder at any cost !

 edit  First pledge to me that you will never break this secret to anyone !

       Great ! Thanks for your pledge. I can proceed happily now !

Moving on now to the three step process I mentioned earlier. The process is typically covered over a period of 2-3 years (considering the IT scenario now) so you must have a patience, a will to put shifts & hard work, capability to learn new things / skills as well as unlearn if the time demands you to do so and pray for a little bit of luck along the way.

The three steps of the process are Prepare, Practice & Pass. So henceforth I would call it as a 3Ps process.

I hope to publish a series of about 4 posts (including this) on career progression and how you can use the 3Ps process (Prepare, Practice & Pass) for your benefit.

Till then, enjoy your time on my blog and as usual thanks for visiting the it.

This is a series of FOUR posts on Guide for career progression – 3Ps process.  Other posts on this could be found below.

Part ONE – Overview
Part TWO – Prepare yourself
Part THREE – Practice hard, become a key player
Part FOUR – Pass it on & progress

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My perspective on performance appraisals of a team – the opportunities & judgements

On February 23, 2009, in Career thoughts, by Swapnil
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How do you assess the performance of an employee reporting to you at work? What is your basis of assessing him and how do you decide on the grade that you would give him for his performance? This is a typical question and situation faced by IT managers whilst carrying out the performance appraisal for their subordinates. Earlier I wrote here about the way typically the performance appraisals are carried out in most of the organizations.

In this post, I am trying to put the equation through my perspective and how I would judge a resource based on the work he / she does in the organization on a project.

One of the most important aspect of Project Management, in my eyes is,  to create and give equal opportunities for your subordinates to perform and on the basis of the performance, judge them on their results & outcome.

The obvious question you would ask is how on earth you could give equal opportunities to the resources within your team to shine? Well, the answer to this is simple.  Create opportunities and innovative ideas and encourage taking initiatives that would make the workplace a better place and obviously help the projects.

Assuming that you have a fixed set of tasks you do as a part of your project and you have a varied experience pattern in the team where some resources are senior (more experienced & some being juniors (relatively less experienced). In this case, most of the times, its observed that more critical work where results are evident and clear, is done by the senior people within the team whilst the junior people are given more of a regular & business as usual tasks such as reporting, housekeeping & less critical work. Probably, in a way, right for the project and right for grooming them to take up more challenging work once they are good hands-on the project.

However, the catch in this is, how long you would keep this situation? In practice, it works, but how long really would you like to keep it as it is? 3 months, 6 months? Well, depending on the manager / team leader they would like to start giving the responsibilities to the junior members sooner rather than later, and give them challenging work so that they could try and prove themselves as being up for the task! In my eyes, the sooner you start is better, probably immediately after you finish the training & into a month on actual project work you give them good responsibilities so that they could grab the opportunities and give you results you need from them.  But again, this is one side of the story !

Second part is, if there is not much routing work that is challenging enough for the teams then what you, as a leader or a manager do? Create chances for the team to show their potential !  .. the obvious question you would ask is HOW?

One of the simplest way to look for chances is to look for opportunities of improvements in your project and try few of the following suggestions to see if you could use them to allocate non-project work to your team members and get results that would benefit the project to either save efforts, save money or save time ! Give them challenges to provide practical and technical solutions to common project problems and situations and judge them on the results they show on this work. The technique of innovation & taking initiative was what I actually tried on my team members and found really useful to understand the potential within the resources and judge them accordingly.   Some of the examples we recently implemented were the knowledge management wiki, our team blog, health check automation, server uptime checker, mailman list for managing incidents and so on. These things really helped the team, the project and in general increased the level of spirit within the team as most of the resources got equal chance to show their potential by doing a definite work package delivery within the appraisal year.

Now moving on to how you judge the resources on their year end performance.

One of the most important thing you should as a project manager is to keep discussing with your resources about the expectations and guide them in their career. I especially dislike the method of “once-a-year” discussion about your work, probably a month before the corporate appraisal cycle ends !  This is absolutely bad practice.  As a project manager, you not only have a responsibility to deliver the quality project, but you also have a responsibility (may be as a parent or caretaker) to nurture the talent within the team and guide your subordinates towards their goals.  Honestly, and unfortunately, not many Project Managers do this in practice.

If you have been discussing the expectations, creating opportunities for the resources to work on, monitor results and measure the outcome of the work regularly enough then it actually builds a level of trust between the manager & subordinate, which really is important in the corporate world.

One example I give to all my colleagues about appraisal is of how a good, excellent & outstanding performer will react when given a simple task “bring me a glass of water”.

Good performer – Joe
If you ask Joe to bring yourself a glass of water. He would go and literally bring you a glass of water as you said.

The people who would do the given job have done a Good job in my eyes. If they do the given task without any issues, without any pitfalls then they have done a Good job, nothing more.

Excellent performer – John
If you ask John to bring yourself a glass of water. He would go and bring you a glass of water, however with it, he would also bring another jar full of water in case you require more after you drink one glass.

You might have noticed how the response of John differs from Joe. Quite simply, he anticipated the customer requirement and took an initiative to address it without the customer asking for it. Bit of happier customer !

The people who do given job excellently would normally have shown good proactive measurements to ensure the given job and related tasks are completed on time and with quality.

Outstanding performer – Josh 
If you ask Josh to bring yourself a glass of water. He would first give you a choice of hot / cold / tap / mineral water and bring you the same. He would also bring an additional stock in case of you needing more once you drink your glass. Whilst you are drinking the water, he would also make arrangements about next time when you might require it and in case he is not around to server you !

Again, you would have noticed how Josh has differed from John in managing customer requirements. When customer puts a requirement for you, you should always go back to customers with options that are possible within the circumstances so you exactly understand what the customer wants and deliver according, exceeding the original expectations.  An even more happier customer here !

The people who, in my eyes, do an outstanding job would not only do the given job to an excellent level, but would go a step further and take proactive measures to make it better next time. They would bring out initiatives, changes to the processes, tasks and drive them to closure.

These people will make significant difference to the project and would be real assets.

 

In the above, I particularly did not comment on the resources who perfo
rm below the Good level and if despite giving opportunities, the resources do not take them and show results, then probably the project is better without them !

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Performance Appraisals – are they really the reflection of your performance?

On February 4, 2009, in Career thoughts, by Swapnil
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If you are a corporate employee you must have undergone the performance appraisals or the end year appraisals and its equally possible that you would have, sometimes, wondered at the outcome of the result ! 

In most (or all) organizations, the performances of the resources are categorized as per something like Excellent, Very good, Good and Needs improvement etc or A+, A, B+, B, C categories that should ideally reflect the performance done by the resource over the year of measurement of the appraisal.

However, what pisses me off is the fact that in most of the organizations they keep silly rules that are nothing to do with the work you do or the project you work on and still could potentially affect your appraisal.  Few of them I think are as follows,

  • Unnecessary points awarded for attendance (come on time and go on time)  -  For God’s sake, we are in a corporate world where the output and outcome of the work matters and not the time someone enters into a building and leaves the building !!!
  • So called corporate trainings – If you would have read my earlier article about trainings, you would probably have guessed that despite the actual training having a little impact on the outcome of the project work or resource efficiency, the simple tick mark of attending the training makes you earn points against your appraisal.
  • Performance levelling across group, organization – According to me this is one of the most bullshit of the rules used in the performance appraisal.  If a person is brilliant in the given environment or scope, there is a likely chance that he is equally brilliant in the bigger environment. The scapegoats of this rule are the people typically working and delivering small scale projects or the projects having less financial or strategic importance to the organization. In an ideal world, the comparison should be done against the actual objective of the project and individual’s contribution to the same, no matter how much money the project is earning to the company.
  • Percentile factor for promotion cases – If there are many proven fantastic team members, if if they actually are excellent, no rule in the world should stop them to earn their own right of having a good appraisal result. However, mostly the management needs to choose only some percentage of top performers to promote and often leaves many of them demoralized !
  • Goals that were set at the start of year – Another pretty useless thing that is part of the annual appraisal process. The goals should always be revised every quarter and should be short term and achievable in the form of proven results.  The misguided and misleading goals that are often set for management also gives a case to cut points off your appraisal.

Finally, the Dilbert comic strip that truly reflects the appraisal process ;-)

dilbert-appraisal1

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