I recently completed my yearly performance review. It was a great chance to step back and think about my goals from now to the end of the year.  I’m publishing them here, in case you have ideas that can help, or are working on something similar. Got something helpful I can read? An example or case study of how other orgs are doing these things well? Let’s chat.

What do I do?

Impact: I strengthen how we plan — yearly, quarterly and each Heartbeat.

My goal is: to make MoFo more transparent, focused and collaborative. I want to measure that through: clarity, velocity and happiness.

• Clarity — what’s the plan? what are our goals? what percentage of staff and community know where / how to find them?
• Velocity — how quickly can we ship quality work?
•  Happiness — how engaged is our team? are we a happy pirate ship of productive MoFos? are people freed from administrivia, confusion and baloney, so they can focus on what matters?

My goals for Q3 / Q4

1) Rock 2016 planning 

“How are we putting the Mozilla Learning plan into action?” Work in the open to create more shared ownership with all staff and community. Apply what we learned from last year’s process.

2) Strengthen our quarterly planning 

“What did we learn last quarter? What are our goals for this one?” Iterate our Program Review process to make it more transparent, relevant to more staff and community, and focused on follow-up items.

3) Sharpen the Heartbeat process

“How are we deploying resources for the next two weeks? How do we make that smarter?”  Create ways to measure (and increase) our velocity and happiness.

4) Ship “build.mofo.org”

“How do I do x? Where do I find y?” Expand and improve build.webmaker.org. Create a single planning dashboard,  on-boarding platform, and point of truth for all MoFo. Consolidate build, plan and handbook into one thing.

5) Strengthen our PM muscle

“How do we achieve better results with less work?” Have Product Managers, Program Managers and Project Managers work more closely together. Bring product thinking into everything we do. Learn from MoCo.

Success criteria and testing: for each of these, I’ve listed some potential success criteria below. Meaning: how could we *test* to see whether these things are actually working or not?

rock 2016 planning

Apply what we learned in 2015 to make 2016 planning process better. Specifically:

• More and earlier participation from specific players.
• Broader socialization and ownership from distributed leaders and staff.
• Smarter process for setting and socializing our goals and KPIs.

Success criteria:

• Teams are ready to work / start executing on Jan 1. With Q1 goals that are already well fleshed out.
• Distributed leaders understand and use a shared planning vocabulary. (e.g., goal, KPI, program, key initiative, impact statements, etc.)
• Better integration for our support teams into the overall plan.

 

Strengthen quarterly planning

The Program Review process has become a big part of how we do emergent planning each quarter. We can improve it by increasing transparency and co-ownership for all staff in that process. Specifically:

• Better follow up on key issues raised in the review. Feels like we get to the finish line, then drop and move on.
• More transparency and participation for all staff. This is key. There’s good stuff in those reviews — we want everyone to know what’s in there, and play a role in it.
• Increased harmony with the board slide process. Apply what we learned in Q1 and Q2 to increase efficiencies.

Success criteria:

•  VPs, Directors and Program Managers report that Program Review is making their work better.
• Program Reviews produce concrete changes to the program’s plan of record.
• Staff feel like they’re well-included.
• People no longer complain about templates.

Ship “build.mofo.org”

Consolidate and expand MoFo’s organizational dashboard.

• Evolve build.webmaker.org into something for the whole org.
• Single point of truth. A single view for all MoFo goals, programs, metrics and plans of record, through a simple interface.
• Package and consolidate a bunch of what we shipped already this year (handbooks, shared roadmaps, etc.) into one thing.

Why? Better on-boarding for MoFo across the board. Less document confusion and chaos. More visibility and longer-term planning. Streamlined workflow and documentation.

Success criteria: a new hire can go there and understand WTF is going on.

sharpen our Heartbeat process

We’ve made great strides here, but we can still sharpen the axe. The role of production work vs. non-production work (e.g., stuff that requires designers and engineers vs. not) is still unclear to many. There’s also a request to strengthen the inputs and outputs between the Heartbeat process and our senior management team.

Success criteria:

• Increased velocity. A better way for us to measure velocty together.
• Happiness metric? We could also consider integrating Scrum.inc’s “happiness metric” here.

Strengthen OUR PM muscle

By that I mean: Program Managers, Product Managers and Project Managers working more closely and sharing tips with each other. It doesn’t make sense for our Program Managers to work in a vacuum — they should work more closely with Product Managers, and with people who don’t necessarily have “project manager” in their job title, but that do a lot of this each heartbeat. We also need to learn more from Program Managers at MoCo. I think this is the next step in the evolution of how we should do Program Management at MoFo.

Success criteria:

• Evidence that we’re translating best practices / success templates across MoFo programs and key intitatives
• Applying at least one insight or best practice from MoCo at MoFo
• MoFo PMs start regularly attending MoCo Program Reviews