Providing feedback for others is the best way to help. This presentation talks about 5 things to keep in mind while giving feedback for others.

1. How to give effective feedback? - Jayakumar Balasubramanian How to give effective Feedback? - Jayakumar Balasubramanian [ [email_address] ]

4. Five things to do... 1. Devil is in the details 2. Examples, examples and examples 3. Negative feedbacks are not bad 4. Subjective vs Objective 5. Give recommentations

5. #1 Devil is in the details 1. At first sight, everything looks 'good' 2. Differentiation happens with details 3. The 'How' factor 4. More important for self appraisal

6. One liners doesn't help! Goal: Zero customer defects Detail: No customer defects found Goal: Follow all quality processes/guidelines Details: Followed all quality processes/guidelines Goal: Contribute to team competency improvement Details: Taken a training on OS basics Goal: Complete PMP certification Details: Passed PMP certification with Good grade

7. Some examples – Feeback for others "Rajesh is Technically a excellent person" "Rohit has helped me a lot" "Priya's problem solving ability is average" "Blank fields" “ Zubair's contribution to v1.0 release was bad" "Arun need to take initiative" "Madan should be more responsible"

9. #2 Give examples "Rajesh is Technically a excellent person" "Rajesh has in-depth technical knowledge in application space debugging. For example, when we were working on a urgent release to customer X,I was stuck with a crash defect (Defect number: 435001) for 3 days, with only 2 more days left for the release. When I explained to Rajesh, he quickly jumped into the issue. With his in-depth ability to analyse crash dump, the issue got narrowed down in 2 hours. This has resulted in we giving a demo release to customer ahead of time”. Expand the one liners as follows...

10. Another example... "Cleared PMP certification with good marks" "Cleared PMP certification during April 2011. This has helped me to understand mainly the estimation aspects in project management, which resulted in 0% effort varience for v2.0 release. This new competency & knowledge also helped to scope the project better by closely understnading customer needs”

13. Providing negative feedback... “ Zubair's contribution to v1.0 was bad" "Zubair need to improve on taking complete ownership ownership. For example, while working on defect 435002 in v1.0, his understanding should have been deeper before sending the observations to customer,saying it was a setup problem. Eventually the issue was traced into MMU option not turned ON in the Makefile"

14. Avoiding personal attacks.. "I don't like Rajan's face. I don't want to interact or work with him anymore. In future I would like to either avoid or make person Arun to interact with Rajan" "While working with Rajan, I found he is lacking listening skills. Rajan made lot of assumptions about the work because of which I had difficulty working on requirement 23457, where I spent 3 days explaining the same to him. This is not a productive as far the team is concerned"

15. #5 Give recommendations 1. Applies to both positive and negative feedback 2. Really helps to provide focussed feedback and re-direction 3. Not only part of the problem, but focus on solution 4. The person taking the feedback also would feel positive and contribute more

16. Recommendation (Positive feedback) "Rajesh has in-depth technical knowledge in application space debugging. For example, when we were working on a urgent release to customer X,I was stuck with a crash defect (Defect number: 435001) for 3 days, with only 2 more days left for the release. When I explained to Rajesh, he quickly jumped into the issue. With his in-depth ability to analyse crash dump, the issue got narrowed down in 2 hours. This has resulted in we giving a demo release to customer ahead of time. I would recommend Rajesh to create a small write-up about application dump analysis and share it with broader community, so that is can be leveraged across teams/members"

17. Recommendation (Negative Feedback) "Zubair need to improve on his and work on his ownership. For example, while working on defect 435002, his understanding should have been deeper before sending the observations to customer, saying it was a setup problem. Eventually the issue was traced into MMU option not turned ON in the Makefile. I would recommend Zubair to go thro' the Makefile advanced documentation v2.0, so that he can gather deeper understanding about how Makefiles are built in our system. This would help him to troubleshoot issues better in future"

18. "While working with Rajan, I found he is lacking listening skills. He made lot of assumptions about the work because of which I had difficulty working on requirement 23457, where I spent 3 days explaining the same to him. This is not a productive environment as a far the team is concerned. I would recommend Rajan to focus on listening skills by attending the listening skills training organized by HR team. Also Rajan can read Seven Habits books by Dr.Stephen Covey” Recommendation (Negative Feedback)

19. Best practices 1. Keep a log of your work 2. Spend time for writing feedback (self & others) 3. Keep your own format 4. Archive feedback 5. Develop genuine interest for others

20. Thank you! Got comments/inputs about this presentation? Please send them to [email_address]