The Accomplishment Spreadsheet

This time of year can be particularly stressful thanks to two words: performance reviews.

It’s not that we’ve not done great work, it’s often that we either struggle with articulating the work we’ve done, and sometimes it’s just about remembering it all! If you get asked to do peer reviews, well - you get several times the fun, because you need to remember what work your colleagues did over the year as well as your own.

To help ease the “fun” of performance reviews over the years I have developed a technique that I have glamorously and imaginatively named The Accomplishment Spreadsheet. Today we are going to look at how it could help you with your own performance review, and any peer reviews you may be asked to do. We are not going to focus on anything else like getting promoted, but of course keeping a record of what you achieve doesn’t hurt when it comes to selling yourself for a promotion.

Setup

The columns of the spreadsheet are below. I do one tab per half year, but if you are working on a quarterly review (which is evil, but I’ve seen it happen) or your role consists of a lot of smaller projects, you might want to have a tab per quarter rather than per half.

I prefer keeping this in a Google sheet as I can then update it from my phone when I get inspiration - keeping this in an Excel file on one computer limits the amount you will keep this updated.

Brain dump

The hardest part with this process is starting. We’re going to take the first column (What) and list every project you’ve worked on over the past year. This will often be the project title - it doesn’t need to be overly verbose, a very brief description of what you did is sufficient.

Impact

This is the second most important column - What was the impact?. This is where you get to show off how amazing the work you did was. What did you achieve? Did you save money? Reduce time for X to happen? Improve security? Enable your colleagues to do something amazing? Brag about the work. Preventing disaster is also impact - what would have happened if you hadn’t completed this work? Be precise, use metrics if possible. If your project resolved a security problem, which CVEs did it close? If your project saves time, measure how much it saves.

The customer

Who benefited from your work? In other words, who was the customer? Did a particular team ask for the work to be done? Use this as a set of people you could potentially ask for peer reviews. Try to be as specific as possible about the teams or people that benefited from your work.

Collaboration

Who did you work with? This is especially useful for peer reviews - you will hopefully have worked with the people who ask you to perform a peer review, and this will help you keep track of who you worked with and what their contribution was. Highlight if the work was cross functional and note the teams you worked with. Call attention to your role in the working group - did you lead the team, provide specialist expertise?

Level

In my opinion, this is the most important column. If your organization has a career ladder (if you don’t have one, why not help create one?), you should map everything you do against it. You should be constantly self-evaluating your work - am I performing at or above the standard that is expected of my job level? Do I need to do something else to perform at the level that is expected of me? That brings us to the final part…

What should I do with all of this?

You should share this document with your manager. I review mine with my manager at least quarterly. This helps me keep on track outside of our performance review cycle, and an outside view means that my estimation of the level which I am performing at is accurate. If I need to improve my performance in any area, I have time to take action.

If you keep this sheet up to date and discuss it regularly, hopefully performance review season can be a little less stressful since it should hopefully now just be a case of copying and pasting the relevant pieces.