This presentation gives a bit of background information as to why the Hyperformix development team (now acquired by CA Technologies) discontinued the traditional annual performance review system when they switched to an agile development philosophy/mindset. The blog post with additional information is located here: http://www.multicastmatt.blogspot.com/2013/03/why-did-we-stop-annual-performance.html

1. Agile Austin Leaders SIG
AGILE PERFORMANCE June 1, 2012
Matt Roberts
REVIEWS?
matt@matt-roberts.com
Twitter @multicastmatt
linkedin.com/in/cpgmattr

2. DE RIGEUR DILBERT
FURTHER
DISCUSSION

3. KEY TAKEAWAYS (THE FINE PRINT)
 To run an agile organization, managers need to understand that
―traditional*‖ techniques for ―managing‖ people simply are not
effective and modern** principals must be adopted. By
understanding what motivates knowledge workers and leading
them, your teams will constantly adapt and grow, delivering
higher and higher value to the company. Many other positive
side effects will emerge.
 By constantly following these principals, you will either bring
massive organizational value (happy teams delivering high
value work) or get fired. Possibly both (keep this in mind—
seriously)
*What we call “traditional” came out of mass production era
of 1930s and 1940s driven by companies that needed to
scale for war effor ts and had unlimited demand —there
wasn’t anything scientific about it.
**Modern as of 1950 (yes, seriously, it’s been a while)

4. PERFORMANCE REVIEWS DESTROY VALUE IN
AN ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE
WORKERS
 What they are
 Gamed (by EVERYONE)
 Subjective to the manager
 Awesome at destroying trust that is critical for individual contributors
and managers to operate effectively in rapidly changing conditions
 A fantastic way of giving the HR organization undue power and
influence
 Throw-away work for all involved (i.e. WASTE)
 What they are not
 A good way of assigning raises
 Fair (to ANYONE)
 A way of attaining agility as a business
 A good way of new managers to learn about
incoming individual contributors to their
team.

5. AN ALTERNATIVE – THE PERFORMANCE
PREVIEW*
 Almost everyone in Hyperformix was on a Performance Bonus
System tied to quarterly corporate goals.
 Laid down by the Board of Directors
 Negotiated with Senior Management Team
 Worked with Individual Contributors (IC) to create alignment
 3 meetings per quarter between manager and IC —
beginning, middle, end (I added one in the middle to make sure that
the IC was on track)
 Managers could not achieve 100% without their teams achieving
100% (aligning performance incentives)
 This created another level of alignment with the business goals and
what people did. Yes, we already had Scrum that did that for us as
well as a team focused on Agile values and principals, so almost all
of these were HIGHLY paid out.
 I still had a problem with it, but it didn’t completely suck
*‖Performance Preview‖ taken from G et R i d o f t h e Pe r f o r ma n c e Rev i ew , b u t t h e s y s te m
w a s c r e a te d i n d e p e n d e n t o f t h e b o o k .

6. MANAGER QUARTERLY GOAL – BEGINNING OF
QUARTER

7. MANAGER PERFORMANCE – END OF QUARTER

8. INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTOR QUARTERLY GOAL
– BEGINNING OF QUARTER

9. INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTOR QUARTERLY GOAL
– END OF QUARTER
Categories
of IC are
the same Additions
as the During
Manager Quarter
Removal
During
Quarter

10. THE ELEPHANT ON THE ROOM – APPRAISALS
AND COMPENSATION BY MARY AND TOM
POPPENDIECK
YouTube Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M
SYlqx1Yvqk
.PDF
http://bit.ly/XOLWcI

11. MATT’S VASTLY INCOMPLETE READING LIST
FOR THIS SUBJECT AREA
Peopleware
Tom DeMarco and
Timothy Lister
Get Rid of the Performance Review,
Samuel A . Culbert with Lawrence Rout
Slack
Tom DeMarco