Using Projects as Your Personal Development Goals

 

I recently completed an article on Better Annual Performance Goal Planning but was not really finished. There is more advice to pass on. 

You can read the article first, but it's not necessary. But definitely read it. Really. 

The point of the article is that small process improvement projects can be great to use as goals in your annual personal/career development plan - if you do it right and take advantage of your project management skills. Here's an example scenario to help you understand how to apply the steps to yourself.

• You see a problem with recent project selection where IT infrastructure improvements have been the norm and business processes updates have not  been given adequate attention.  You want to show that you can fix this to add to the efficiency of the organization while improving your skills.  
• Your plan is to define your skill improvement as leading a short-term project updating business processes to correspond to recent IT infrastructure improvements.  
• You put that project into your annual development plan, after obtaining approval from the boss. You are not finished, however.

This project is a little different than you are used to in that there will have to be a closer collaboration with more business stakeholders. Of course, that is how you are developing new skills. You determine that you need, in addition to your existing project management skills, training in certain business details, and that this training should be included in your development plan.  

You can be general about the training required, because considerations get a little complicated. For example, once you get into the project in this scenario...

• You will likely need business organizational information (who reports to whom, which departments do what activities, etc.). This may or may not require formal training.
• You will likely need to know current business process workflows. These should be documented somewhere. If up-to-date business process workflows do not exist, too often the case, you may have to develop or update them in your project. To be successful in this activity, you may have to take some kind of legal/compliance training or obtain knowledge specific to the business. That would be documentable.

Finally, keep track of your deliverables and development in association with the project so that you can document all that you did for your periodic development review.