Reflection Example
Word Count ~1000
Here’s a sample Performance Reflection. I recommend drafting your
Reflection in a word document over several weeks. Let your personality shine
through with specific examples and clear writing in an easy to read format
(bullets and hyperlinks are encouraged). Remember, this Reflection is just
the second half of 2022 (July through December) not the full year.
I. Summary - Use this section as a holistic overview to share any
additional context, contributions or accomplishments you want to
share with your manager. Set the stage for showcasing your
Business Outcomes and Skills below.
When I look back on my goals and successes from the first half of 2022 I am
astonished at what my team, and I have been able to accomplish. I took a
leadership position in the development and release of a new project. I
continued to mentor a P-Tech students at local schools. I created and fixed a
defect autonomously based on customers' feedback. I was able to present
publicly alongside my co-workers.
Overall, I think my accomplishments for the first half of 2022 were really
around my eminence within a set of strategic communities. I have made
significant impacts within my organization within IBM, externally within the
community, with our customers, with my project community, and with the
general public.
II. Business Outcomes - What did you achieve related to Business
Outcomes and how you demonstrated IBM’s Culture
Formula: our Purpose, Values and Growth Behaviors, while
delivering these outcomes in the last 6 months? We recommend
you share your top 3-5 achievements.
What I delivered:
I coordinated with our docs team to bring the documentation over to
the project site to make it more accessible and serviceable.
How I delivered it: Growth Minded
Took feedback from our support team members that our trace
enablement documentation was hard to understand and follow. Instead
of just updating our documentation in Knowledge Center I coordinated
with our docs team to bring the documentation over to the project.
What I delivered:
I had the foresight to prioritize the triaging and fixing of concurrency
defects as we went into feature approval. I also went through the
department and team backlogs to make sure all defects were correctly
labeled and prioritized. This actually revealed some Java 19 defects
that likely would not have made it onto our backlog.
How I delivered it: Trusted and Team Focused
During my latest rotation as iteration lead, I took it upon myself to go
above and beyond the position. As I did all this work I communicated it
to my team, delegated to the team, and received positive feedback
about the organization and helpfulness of the work I was doing.
I was able to closely collaborate with our new team member on quite a
few projects for the first half of 2022 as well as mentoring him.
What I delivered:
A customer had an issue that the project was not correctly reading the
certificate keystore and the connection would fail. I developed a test
project and provided it to the Java and Security teams to get feedback
on the issue. Upon further testing, I was able to research and find a
solution to the issue. The customer was very pleased.
I created a demo template that could be used for no ship, beta, and
released features. I then shared this template with my team and others
in the organization.
How I delivered it: Courageous and Resourceful
There were a number of customer cases during the first half of 2022
that I found very challenging but was able to resolve due to my
willingness to test out solutions and provide troubleshooting.
While working on the feature approval process I had issues creating
and presenting a demo to the organization. The problem was that the
features were not shipped or beta yet which means I had to create the
demo within my development environment. What would happen is I
would verify the demo worked one week, then the next week my demo
would break due to other development I had done in the meantime.
III. Skills - What skills that you have developed and / or shared since
your last reflection, and how you have applied them to deliver
outcomes in the last 6 months? We recommend you share your top
3-5 achievements.
When setting goals at the end of 2021 and within my annual reflection I set a
goal of learning and going through the feature development process from
start to finish. During the first half of 2022, I was able to accomplish that goal
by taking over the leadership of the project. For these features, I was able to
get involved in the project communities for these features, write and size
stories, and participate in the feature approval process.
Additionally, due to a customer-reported defect I opened and fixed
autonomously. This was a great experience because I had previously only
assisted in defects and have never been able to see one through to
completion.
Finally, I lead the development of the new project toolkit. This allowed me to
get involved in the project community and I have since been voted a
contributor to the specification. During this project, I was able to learn about
the release and approval process.
IV. Focus Areas and Action Plan - What 2-3 areas are you going to
focus on next, and what steps will you take to continue your growth
and development? (Hint: Use these steps to create new goals!)
When I look back at the accomplishments, I was able to make in the first half
of 2022 I do see a lack of focus on developing new skills. That is not to say
that I did not develop any new skills/knowledge, but more so that while doing
research for features and other projects, I failed to organize and report my
education.
For the second half of 2022, I want to focus on improving my skills
development process. This will involve reporting self-learning on the
YourLearning platform, sharing learning resources with others in the
organization, and documenting applications for technologies/techniques that
I discover along the way.
My action plan for the second half of 2022 includes:
Log self-learning in YourLearning
Complete the Growth Behaviors education
Work on the development of our remaining project
Finish work backporting database rotation
More regularly triage and fix defects instead of waiting till my turn as
iteration lead.
