On 12/11/2013 10:31 AM, scott wrote:
> As you were the entire IT department in your last job, then I would
> expect your objectives and goals would be more like department goals.
> Things like "% of staff requests answered within 4 hours", or "% of
> uptime for critical servers and infrastructure" or "implement a new
> system to increase storage and backup capacity" whatever is actually
> important for your employer. You can then set targets and measure your
> performance against them.

Staff requests equate to people standing outside my door asking me to 
fix it. Perhaps "time to fix" rather than "time to respond" would be a 
better measure. It would still require somebody to actually *measure* 
this stuff.

Ditto for uptime. Systems were a bit unstable when I joined, but within 
a few years everything was stable enough that I basically didn't need to 
even *be* there any more.

"Implement new system to increase performance" would require that 
somebody actually give me the *money* to perform badly-needed upgrades. 
Never gonna happen. :-P

Basically, for the best part of ten years, all I really did was swap the 
backup tapes once a week.

>> My new employer - heh, "new". I've been there over a year! Oh yes, which
>> is why I apparently need to fill out an appraisal form. Any ideas for
>> creative ways to say "last year I wrote code, this year I will write
>> code"? ;-)
>
> Don't you have certain projects you are meant to work on? Your goals
> should be based on things like "complete project X by date Y" or "become
> the company expert for Z" or personal development type stuff "chair a
> customer review" or "mentor new staff" etc.

Not really. There is no long-term plan. We just show up each day and 
mungle on with writing the code. Deadlines don't really exist.

> Did you ever hear of SMART
> objectives? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria

No - but it sounds interesting...

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