Utah Department of Community and Culture
TIPS ON PREPARING YOUR PMP:
1. Before you go into your end-of-year review of your PMP with your supervisor, fill in Part IV, if applicable, and Part V: your chance to celebrate. Read these tips before you go into that review, as they will likely inspire some questions to your supervisor. 2. Once you have had that review, you will have a lot better idea of goals for the next fiscal year. When you’re ready to prepare the new one, pull up your old PMP, and save as a new file. But don’t clean out all those old words in Part II. In fact, copy in Employee Rating and Manager Rating from your review so you have that record electronically. Remember that the two years worth of progress and success laid out in one document is a nice tool for managers and for employees. 3. Go to Part III. Start with the goals that you and your supervisor have agreed should be continued. Copy and paste from Part II, and make any changes and adjustments. 4. Continue with new goals. Your supervisor has been encouraged to share with you major goals he or she has set for your program or your division. Reflect on how you will be contributing to those goals in the next year, and how that rolls up into the Strategic Plan. Consider those indicators being tracked in the Balanced Score Card, and how your work contributes there. 5. Likewise, obtain a list of Business Initiatives from your supervisor, and assess how your job relates to fulfilling one or more of them. 6. Not every box has to have something written in it. If your job has nothing to do with one of the department or division goals, you don’t have to reach for a way to attain that goal. Or, in some cases, your responsibility will be merely to attend any group meetings on the topic and provide senior management with information and ideas for their fulfilling that particular goal. Consider, too, your role in the topic. You may not be responsible for creating a communications plan, for example, but you can help execute it by providing the Public Information Specialist with information for a press release. 7. In other instances, you will see a goal that is all about you and your job. Use as much space as you need. 8. That said, you will love your PMP more if it is not too wordy, as you will be looking at it again. Try to summarize wherever you can do so without losing meaning.
9. This is the formal document to guide your performance and to guide your supervisor in rating your performance, but it is organic. Your supervisor will have contact throughout the year. Goals can be modified at any time by you and your supervisor when that is the most constructive thing to do. It’s alright to hand write amendments together—both of you can initial the changes. And you really ought to have the document out of the drawer periodically, making note of what it was you promised to do, and your progress. 10. Be sure that your goals reflect what you can actually control. For example, you cannot control how many customers ask for help, but you can control how you respond, what strategies and tools you use, etc. You cannot always predict the date that others will put work on your desk, but you can set targets of time needed for processing that work once you have it. Another note on choosing goals: Look at the complexity and the specificity of your job. You and your supervisor need to decide whether it is most reasonable to assess your performance on a wide spectrum of goals reflecting all aspects of your job description, or whether there are just a few key elements on which to focus. A PMP can be effective with just 4 or 5 main goals, but with some jobs, this would not nearly cover it. Refer to S.M.A.R.T. Goals, attached, for guidance in writing goals. 11. Management Development is somewhat different from Technical/Functional Training. It involves what you are doing for yourself outside of formal training to make yourself a stronger employee, a stronger manager, and a better candidate for promotion. Some are putting down personal goals, health or otherwise, some are listing reading or research they want to do, some are defining new approaches to their work or to the way they supervise. If you participate in Book Club, that is all about Management Development. 12. For Metrics/Target, ask yourself how your supervisor will know that you have achieved, and what level should be expected. It can be as simple as saying that you will process ____% of the __________s you receive within ____ business days of the time you receive them. You can set similar targets if another element (e.g. accuracy or quality) is most important or is what you are working on improving this year. Then, put a date on it for Target Date, so your supervisor will know when to expect that you will have achieved. This may coincide with a deadline or a project finish part way through the year, or may be June 30, 2008 because that is the end of the period covered by this PMP. You might eventually cut and paste the whole thing into 20082009 (with date changes) if it is ongoing and the goal is still pertinent. 13. Section E., Improve DCC Productivity and Effectiveness, is your chance to tout your program or piece of a program, what it does for Utah and Utahns (or to the functioning of the division), why that is important, and how you personally help that happen. This section will be valuable in mapping a picture of the critical role and the effectiveness of the whole division and the whole department. Consider a phrase or sentence with punch, like “process applications so efficiently that no qualified Utahn has to go an extra day without an adequately heated home” or
“leverage every state dollar more dramatically than any other major program in the state” or “provide service so proficiently that our program will qualify for contention as one of the top five in the nation as recognized by _____________ (professional organization)” or “procure and organize resources necessary for chronic homeless individuals to be stabilized in housing after years on the street.” You get the idea. 14. Enjoy the process. This is your chance to put in print what you know you can do. It is your chance to show your part in elevating quality of life for Utah citizens. It will be the document that allows you to quantify and celebrate success. It will also align with our strategic plan and with balanced scorecard, so that division and department planning is directly related to your job. We are here to help. Please don’t hesitate to ask for personal assistance.
Creating S.M.A.R.T. Goals
From Paul J. Meyer's "Attitude Is Everything."
Specific
Measurable Attainable Realistic Tangible
Specific - A specific goal has a much greater chance of being accomplished than a general goal. To set a specific goal you must answer the six "W" questions: *Who: *What: *Where: *When: *Which: *Why: Who is involved? What do I want to accomplish? Identify a location. Establish a time frame. Identify requirements and constraints. Specific reasons, purpose or benefits of accomplishing the goal.
EXAMPLE: A general goal would be, "Get in shape." But a specific goal would say, "Join a health club and workout 3 days a week." Measurable - Establish concrete criteria for measuring progress toward the attainment of each goal you set. When you measure your progress, you stay on track,
reach your target dates, and experience the exhilaration of achievement that spurs you on to continued effort required to reach your goal. To determine if your goal is measurable, ask questions such as......How much? How many? How will I know when it is accomplished? Attainable - When you identify goals that are most important to you, you begin to figure out ways you can make them come true. You develop the attitudes, abilities, skills, and financial capacity to reach them. You begin seeing previously overlooked opportunities to bring yourself closer to the achievement of your goals. You can attain most any goal you set when you plan your steps wisely and establish a time frame that allows you to carry out those steps. Goals that may have seemed far away and out of reach eventually move closer and become attainable, not because your goals shrink, but because you grow and expand to match them. When you list your goals you build your self-image. You see yourself as worthy of these goals, and develop the traits and personality that allow you to possess them. Realistic - To be realistic, a goal must represent an objective toward which you are both willing and able to work. A goal can be both high and realistic; you are the only one who can decide just how high your goal should be. But be sure that every goal represents substantial progress. A high goal is frequently easier to reach than a low one because a low goal exerts low motivational force. Some of the hardest jobs you ever accomplished actually seem easy simply because they were a labor of love. Your goal is probably realistic if you truly believe that it can be accomplished. Additional ways to know if your goal is realistic is to determine if you have accomplished anything similar in the past or ask yourself what conditions would have to exist to accomplish this goal. Tangible - A goal is tangible when you can experience it with one of the senses, that is, taste, touch, smell, sight or hearing. When your goal is tangible, or when you tie an tangible goal to a intangible goal, you have a better chance of making it specific and measurable and thus attainable. Intangible goals are your goals for the internal changes required to reach more tangible goals. They are the personality characteristics and the behavior patterns you must develop to pave the way to success in your career or for reaching some other long-term goal. Since intangible goals are vital for improving your effectiveness, give close attention to tangible ways for measuring them.