John Linton
I suppose if you thought long enough and hard enough you could come up with a position in an IT/Communications company that could benefit from having an 'annual performance review' held between an employee and his/her immediate manager but I've never been able to find one in my association with managing within the IT/Communications industry. You might even be able to come up with a first line manager that might be able to make such an annual meeting achieve some sort of value but in over 30 years of involvement and observation of hundreds of such situations I have never come across one. However, I understand from several acquaintances who hold senior positions in very large Australian and multi-national companies that there are still annual reviews embedded in the processes of many people's lives in this and other countries.
How very quaint - sort of like driving in to a remote country town in outback Queensland and seeing a blacksmith's forge in full operation.
When we started Exetel one of our main objectives was to automate as many of our procedures and processes as we could. We realised that this would turn out to be an 'endless' process and that it would encounter huge and sometimes apparently insurmountable 'barriers' along the way. After almost five years we are still writing new automated processes and we continue to refine the processes already written.The list of automation to be done is still as long as when we had no automated processes and we are still using MySQL as the company's key information engine.
One of the major processes that was on that initial 'wish list' was the complete automation of setting and reviewing job goals on an annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly and second by second basis. We are now coming up to the second 'anniversary' of the commencement of that project and, for the first time, we will get the quarterly personnel job performance assessments from the system we labeled with the development acronym of GURUs. It has taken us two years to reach this stage and, of course, it is really only equivalent to a beta version of any 'final' system but it now does almost all of the things we set out to achieve.
Before we started the development I wrote a 'white paper' that documented what I saw as the limitations and outright failures of all of the different personnel task setting/evaluation/measurement systems I had ever encountered, developed myself and/or used or managed the use of throughout my career. I provided this 'paper' as the base document of what any system we developed must eliminate as well as what it must produce. That base explanation can be found here:
http://whitepapers.exetel.com.au/mediawiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
Exetel now has 41 employees (13 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, 24 in North Sydney and 1 each in Perth, Mosman, Canberra and the NSW Central Coast) all but one of whom now has a set of agreed 'tasks' and achievement dates and other criteria that are measured by the GURUs system. The performance of the company, each 'department' and each individual is measured (some tasks on, literally, a second by second basis) against a simple rating system by task, aggregated to individual, aggregated to department and finally aggregated to 'company' on a measurement system of:
1 = far exceeds all requirements
2 = exceeds all requirements
3 = exceeds some requirements, meets the rest
4 = meets all requirements
5 = doesn't meet all requirements
(these were the original 'ratings' used by IBM in the 1970s and I've never found a better set of 'ratings')
There are over 300 tasks/individuals at this stage of development and they have been changed and refined over the last six months as the more complicated and difficult 'data fetchers' required to provide the data to be measured have been written and adapted and often re-adapted. The data required comes from many different sources that include third party hardware and software, our VOIP telephone systems and our data base:
MRTG, NAGIOS, Cerberus, Mytel, Cisco, Asterisk, MySQL and dozens of pieces of our own control and monitoring code.
The system provides the directors of the company with an 'on screen' health rotation that cycles through the overall company rating followed by the ten operating departments followed by the ten lowest rating tasks followed by the ten lowest rating employees (in terms of the agreed tasks/measurements of the tasks). Any director or manager can select any task or individual to look at in terms of why any task is showing as not being achieved and can 'custom' design on screen 'reports' to suit his or her own needs of seeing what is happening with his/her responsibilities and the people they are responsible for managing.
Alternatively the manager can elect to be advised by email of any task/person that is not meeting any level of performance he/she has set.
At the end of each month the system will provide reports for each individual on their performance for the month (and YTD), the quarter, the half year and, if required, any greater span of time - including the dreaded 'annual performance'.
We have had to write some 'challenging' "data fetchers" to provide real time evaluation of many different aspects of our operations and we will undoubtedly have to write many more - as well as making continual changes to the ones we have already developed. However, right now, the GURUs system will produce a monthly and YTD report for every Exetel person as well as providing minute by minute department and personnel performance evaluation available to each department manager via their own customised reporting and to each member of their department via wall mounted plasma screens that list each person in each department by ranking every minute of the day.
I feel very comforted seeing an almost constant "2" whenever I look at the system now.