Tuesday, January 1, 2013

I'll spend hour two planning SMART goals for hour three.

 Our new initiative for this year is to give you immediate feedback on performance.  Your first hour shows obvious room for improvement.


Happy New Year and welcome to 2013!  A little late getting going this morning because I spent the evening playing poker and Cards Against Humanity.  Definitely a good New Year's game if you can relegate the children to the basement to watch television to play Minecraft and Hex Bugs.

I have no goals for the year, other than hoping it's better than last year (given that whole Bus Factor event).  I tend to be a truly iterative goal setter with no thought to watershed dates. The New Year has nothing to do with it whatsoever.  If I want to lose weight?  I pick a general date and a general weight and generally get there.  I come up with a bicycling goal on the fly generally via Adventure Cycling magazine and it determines how I spend a week of my life during the next year.  C&O one year.  This year it's RAGBRAI, primarily because I was in the hospital after signing up last year and it's difficult to ride all banged up and broken so it was pushed out a year.  I strongly recommend not tying your goals to traditional dates.  If you miss one, you don't feel like you have to wait until the next one to try again.  Just reset and go.

If you're not familiar with SMART goals and KPIs, well...I'm jealous.  It's generally impossible to set SMART goals for an upcoming year.  There's something really wrong with claiming to be agile and then setting year-long goals as a developer.
SMART / SMARTER is a mnemonic to guide people when they set objectives, often called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), for example for project management, employee performance management and personal development. The letters broadly conform to the words Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-sensitive with the addition of the words Evaluate and Reevaluate used in more recent literature.

Snarky: Our new initiative for this year is to give you immediate feedback on performance.  Your first hour shows obvious room for improvement.
Title: I'll spend hour two planning SMART goals for hour three.

No comments:

Post a Comment