Vizzuality Guidelines

Vizzuality playbook in progress

This project is maintained by Vizzuality

Professional Guidance

The purpose of this guideline is to make sure there is a way for Vizzuality people to receive support (guidance) in their professional growth.

Contents

How does it work? It’s pretty simple. Choose a guide, then every 3 months have a conversation to define and review your objectives and results. This is an opportunity to celebrate what you’ve achieved and also think carefully about what comes next. Repeat forever.

Principles

How it will work

  1. Identify a guide to help with your objectives (typically someone with more experience and someone schooled in being a guide) and publish who it is in this google doc
  2. Set quarterly/biannual objectives and results yourself and review with the guide. Making sure they are results driven, measurable etc. see below for details in how to write objectives.
  3. Once objectives and results have been set, publish publicly by default unless there is a strong reason not to.
  4. After each quarter,
    • On your own, score each result 0-1 then
    • Arrange a meeting with your guide.
    • During the meeting discuss what went well, what didn’t, what was missed and why.
    • Go away and create new/adjust results and objectives for the next quarter
    • Arrange another 30 mins meeting with guide
    • In meeting, check results and obj, checking they are good and can be measured in 3 months time. Also check how realistic they are and if others need to be involved. Also use checklist below to help.
    • Publish and Repeat
    • Regularly have one-to-ones with your guide and/or peers.

Working with the existing feedback review process

This is tbd pending a new feedback process. This section will be updated once that is agreed. In the interim:

If you have a working review process in place, carry on until the new feedback guidelines are complete. There is one important part that will change. Objectives (sometimes known as goals in the review process) should only be written and shared as part of the guidance process. This is to avoid confusion and duplication of work. Of course you can use what you have learnt in the feedback review to help inform your objectives for the guidance.

If you are happy to use the guidance process in place of the review process, that is okay too. If you do that, it is advised you make sure the reviews are not forgotten and the knowledge in your current reviewers are not ignored. Therefore, for the first round of guidance meetings, it is recommended that your previous reviewers are there too. After the first meeting, the current reviewer will step back and your guide will continue. In some cases it might actually be the same person, in which case the main difference will be the way in which guidance is carried out.

Other details

How objectives and results work and could be written

Each quarter, before meeting with your guide, you will write down what you want in your professional life in the form of objective and results. Why this way? It’s a format used widely across many organisations that allows you to capture what you want to aspire to with some stepping stone results along the way. They’re often referred to as OKRs.

What should objectives be about?

Objectives should be around your professional growth:

How to write objectives with key results

The objective is a high-level statement, typically referring to either something you want to achieve or something you want to become; the common element is a direction or action. Something increases, or decreases, gets faster, slower, is launched, released. For example:

Notice all these objectives have a few things in common.

As stated above, the success or failure to reach these objectives are not directly tied to salary so please, be ambitious! We are trying to save nature and slow climate change. That takes ambition!

You will notice that each of these objectives are not especially measurable, that is where the results come in. Under each objective there are a set of results. This is a statement of what you plan to achieve in order to reach the objectives. Think of them as a series of stepping stones, typically a more measurable result to achieve. Here are some examples based on the above objectives.

Objective x. Increase my technical leadership capabilities from those of a mid-level to a senior

Objective y. Deliver Half-Earth Mapping Platform to the highest possible standard

Objective z. Increase the code quality of all our projects

Notice a few things in the results. All have a time frame. All can be scored if you need to, either by a binary 0 (fail) or 1 (success) or a gradation 0.5 (I did half of what the result stated). All should be ambitious but at least partly achievable. All should be specific. All are results, not tasks. I’ll try and explain that:

It may seem like language trickery, and in some cases, it kind of is. However the idea of making it results-focused is to make sure you have multiple ways to achieve an output. How you do it is up to you. What you plan to create is the thing that is fixed. In some cases it might require multiple people to achieve the result. That is fine.

Checklist for your Objectives and Results

Objectives

Results

Things still to write/do: