Question : Metrics for Individual Performance Measurement

Dear all,

I am supposed to create a kind of Metrics for Measuring Performance among my team of graphics and instructional designers.
Most of the other teams in my company have a great thing called "number of jobs" but, how do a team like mine measure performance where the quantity of work is never proportional to the complexity of work. I have to create a kind of metrics to guage individuals performance.
I would be greatly thankful to anyone who helps me prepare this.

Jayanth Sharma
Bangalore
India

Answer : Metrics for Individual Performance Measurement

Designing a performance metric for something like graphics design is very difficult.  Not only because different people will have different opinions about the graphics.  Some may like it, other may thinks its fantastic.. so this is rather largely subjective, as unfortunately is most of the metrics you will be able to apply.
As such, it will be necessary to define some common standard which people can use to gauge the performance.  Keeping this metric simple yet reflective of its goals would also be the ideal result.
You and your team will need to get together and think up some things that are common to most of the graphics that are design as far as evaluation is concerned.  Once you have those things identifies you can select a few (or maybe even all) to use to calculate your metric.
Let me talk you through an example of what you could use:
Lets say you decide that these three things are key to identifying good/bad performance: Number of jobs done, average complexity of total jobs and finally average quality of total jobs. So those will be our evaluation factors.
Now as I said before, some people will think something is good quality, others may think its average.  So what you will need to go is strictly define some way for people to rate some work roughly on the same level.
So, we can provide each of the evaluation factors on a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is excellent and 1 is poor.
For each of the scores on the scale, you should specify what the work would have to be like to get that score.  So maybe:
 to get a quality rating of 1, the work would have to have bad use of colours and would contain a more than 10 'artwork glitches'.  
To get a rating of 2, the work should contain less than 5 'glitches'.
etc, etc all the way up to number 10:
To get 10, the work should be of a photographically detailed nature and pleasing to the eye.

Hopefully you see what I mean by defining the requirement for each score on the scale.  When rating some work, the above guidelines should always be kept to.

Once all the guidelines for each of the 3 evaluators are done, then its a case of using a bit of maths to get some numbers.  We can simply multiply the values together: Jobs Done x  Complexity x Quality = Performance Metric

This does produce a good balance between people of different nature projects as you can see from below:

               Jobs Done         Average Complexity     Average Quality         Performance Metric
Tom              3                             8                            10                               240
Lisa               6                             5                            10                               180
Simon           2                             1                            10                                20

As you can see, Simon did 2 jobs and they were easy-peasy, but of very good quality, so he only gets 20 since he hasnt done that much (and they were really easy, simple graphics).
But note how Tom only has 3 jobs done, but still has a higer metric than Lisa who has done 6 jobs.  They both produce excellent quality work, but Toms work was significantly harder than what Lisa had to do in her projects.

Hopefully you get an idea of how this work.

Keep in mind that what Ive show above is just an example but can be used effectivly if you put enough thought into it an agree on rating standars and iron out the other small details.