Appraisals - Agile Buddha

In our last post, we discussed about how to break performance measures into team and individual measures to bring more team behavior orientations into appraisals.

Today, let’s talk about addressing other two issues: feedback frequency and how to make feedback effective.

Agile thinking is based on building frequent feedback loops within your teams and organization. Few examples of frequent feedback loops are:

Sprint demos every couple of weeks, to get product feedback
Sprint retros to get process and tool feedback
TDD/BDD/continuos integration to get code feedback
Continuous testing to get quality feedback. Check-out our new launched 2 day extensive workshop on agile way of testing

Appraisals! How many of you dread this word? This is the only time in the year that you get to bargain for salary increments, everyone end-up negotiating to their best. Appraisals are closely connected with salary raise/increments, bonus payouts and it’s feedback intent takes the backseat.

There are three major issues with traditional approach to appraisal:

Measuring and rewarding individual behaviors and contributions OVER team based measurements.
Long appraisal cycle(mostly once a year) discussing both salary increments and feedback.
Feedback process – Filling long appraisals forms with least discussions between reviewers about reviewee.

Appraisals in an Agile Company – Part 2

Appraisals in an Agile Company – Part 1