It's annual evaluation time.

December 19, 2022 1:59 AM

For more than half of 2022, our director has been on paid leave while being investigated for various misdeeds and our acting director has been careening from one nightmare crisis to another. As a result, I have been left without the agency to move one of my huge projects forward for basically the entire year. This has been pleasant for my workload but now it's annual evaluation time. What do I say?

Basically, this project needs buy in from senior leadership before moving to the next phase, and everyone has been too busy keeping the place from burning to the ground to even have a meeting about it. So, I've just been doing the other parts of my job and not this one. Everyone is aware that it's been a terrible year and that they haven't had time for me, but still I need to say something on my self-evaluation. How would you address this? Actual sample language would be greatly appreciated.

posted by anonymous to Work & Money (6 answers total)

Acknowledging and pivoting has always worked for me.

“As we all know, Project Squishmallow is on hold due to many internal factors. I look forward to getting it back on track in 2023. In the meantime, I’m very proud of how we successfully executed Project Cornhole on time and under budget…”

Hope this helps!
posted by kimberussell at 3:02 AM on December 19, 2022 [33 favorites]

If you have been keeping on top of trends, best practices, new tools you might use, etc. while your project has been on hold, you can write that up as a proactive way to be ready when resources are reallocated back to it. I did that while a big project of mine was on hold during COVID. Update your project's proposal/goals/milestones/kpis/etc. accordingly to show you're ready to hit the ground running when whoever ends up in charge says "go."
posted by headnsouth at 5:06 AM on December 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

Project Squishmallow is on hold due to many internal factors. I look forward to getting it back on track in 2023.

Be ready to also say what you need to get it back on track.
posted by biffa at 5:38 AM on December 19, 2022 [12 favorites]

Be prepared to be dinged about this. I’ve learned that busy managers sometimes expect you to move a project forward even if they don’t help you at all. Unless you were expressly told not to try to schedule meetings, you should have kept trying, or figured out intermediate steps to take. Hopefully you were regularly updating your manager on your attempts.

If this does come up as a negative in your evaluation, be prepared to talk about how you attempted to move the project forward, and ask for feedback on how to make progress in this scenario.
posted by haptic_avenger at 6:30 AM on December 19, 2022 [4 favorites]

Also give yourself credit for getting the project up to 'roll out' status during the evaluation period.
posted by calgirl at 9:48 AM on December 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

Definitely give yourself credit for any preparatory work you did! If it's still ready to go when things get moving again, consider it "deferred" or "delayed" and not "missed" (if the way your company talks about project statuses allows for that). And specifically cite the dependencies that blocked you, if you can do so without pointing a finger at a specific individual.

An end-of-quarter status for one of my own projects is going to look something like: "Documented requirements, conducted RFP, and made software decision, but launch deferred to next quarter due to dependency on X team."
posted by rhiannonstone at 9:27 PM on December 20, 2022 [2 favorites]