The past few weeks, we've been preparing our quartly goals as a team and as individuals. These goals can include performance achievements and project accomplishments. It can be anything from drafting a new spec to building and deploying an entire application. Basically, the idea is to come up with six objectives, giving each one a percentage to determine how greatly it affects the final score. Assuming all objectives are met, the percentage will be 100%.
The real importance here comes down to the bonuses. As a team, we need to complete all of our team goals (which, honestly, are not that difficult to achieve so long as we're doing our work). As individuals, things get a bit more complicated, because we can't just slide by doing a minimum amount of work and expect to get our bonus check at the end of the quarter.
The difficulty in this is coming up with goals that will help the team and the company but aren't so much of a longshot that they become impossible to achieve. Now, I can come up with a hundred different things to do that would meet those criteria, but these goals also have to make sense for whatever direction our company is going and what projects we have on our plates. Having been here for only 3 weeks, I'm still learning about some of that, and I question whether to include the tiny parts of each project independently or as a complete objective.
The solution I came up with was to simply group some of the smaller tasks together into a larger objective (typically turning it into a spec) and to take some of the other smaller items and turn them into a different, but somewhat larger, item that would accomplish those tasks without seeming too insignificant to be part of my bonus plan.
The reality of the situation is that I still have to work my ass off to get paid. heh