How to build high performing team using PACT

In this blog, I will share how PACT based goals helped me to build high performing team.

Any manager would want to build a high performing team. But many fail to accomplish it. When I was also struggling to create a high performing team, I was introduced to PACT goals.

The PACT goals helped me to build a high performing team within 6months. The transformation that occurred in the team after adopting PACT based goals was surprising.

What SMART based goals didn’t help me to achieve, PACT based goals helped me to achieve in a shorter time.

In this blog, I will share my experience on how PACT goals helped me as a Engineering manager.

Bottleneck with SMART

The SMART goals were great at the start. The whole team was excited that a goal is defined that is clear and there will be no ambiguity on understanding whether it has been achieved or not.

Since SMART goals had a quantifiable success metric, it was easy for everyone in the team and myself to understand about the goals clearly.

Defining goals was never an issue as there were so many examples out there. As a manager, I had to pick the ones that were more relevant to the team.

At start everything went fine, but the issues started when I had to evaluate each of the team members goals on monthly basis.

One of the goal that I had set was Bug leakage should be less 10%. This sounds easy and very crucial, but I realised, measuring it without a proper system in place is very hard. This is when, I realised my mistake of not setting up the system first before using SMART.

So, I worked with the team and planned onboarding tools which will helps us. The team spent lot of time in getting the system in place. Because we lost at least 2–3 months.

Once the tools, systems were in place, defining the processes that will help to define and measure the goals appropriately took another 2–3 months. Without defining proper processes to capture the information, I realised measuring will become tough again, so this needed good amount time.

By this time, we had already lost 6–8 months. And team was not happy, I was not happy.

Once all the thing were in place, when the team started adhering to the processes it quickly became an overhead. Instead of team focusing on the deliverable, they started focusing on maintaining hygiene of the system.

This lead to dissatisfaction among the team members and myself, as even though we had a measurable goals which are clear, there were so many things to be done in the backend to properly measure and report it.

This was not going in the way I had anticipated and almost a year was lost in setting up everything. So, I wanted another way to make the team focus on their deliverables, initiatives and other related activities without worrying too much about the hygiene of the system.

Adoption of PACT goals

The moment I adopted PACT, I started creating goals like the following.

Compare 5 tools which can replace quality checks written by hand as it is becoming a highly maintainable code.
Do performance bottleneck issues checks in the data ingestion framework to improve ingestion performance by 25%.
Build thin a framework to manage variable datasets for master data ingestion.
Prepare a documentation that acts as reference for setting up modules with default configurations.
and so on

The above goals have a purpose which resonates with the team every well. These are the goals that helped the team to improve efficiency and faster turn arounds.

Since all of the goals were actionable and focuses on the outcome, a fully functioning system was not needed. Even though the hygiene of the systems was sacrificed, the goals were still delivered and outcomes were validated.

The goals were much more focused on medium term and long term goals, so there was enough time for each goal to be accomplished. This didn’t add extra pressure on the team.

The team members could focus on the day-to-day deliverables and also work on their goals which helped to add value.

Since most of the team were enjoying the success of completing the goals by demonstrating the output to the whole team, there was satisfaction among all of them.

Comparison

Here is my comparison between SMART and PACT.

▸ Preparation
Adoption of SMART goals requires preparation of systems and processes. I made a mistake of not setting up these before defining the goals. This caused lot of confusion and dissatisfaction among the team members. So if you want to adopt SMART, check whether you have all the systems and processes in place.

PACT goals didn’t really needed any preparation. It was easily adoptable and the existing processes and system were enough to track the progress and achievements.

▸ Adoption Time
SMART based goals adoption takes time and majority of the time goes in setting up the systems and processes. Without these systems and processes, the measurability aspect of the goals will go way and that leads to unsatisfactory results. In my opinion, 2–4 months to set up all the systems and processes and another 2–4 months for testing the goals and its measurement and then another 2months for stabilisation is needed.

PACT based goals does not need any stringent systems and processes. The existing processes itself can be used. So only time is needed to decide the right goals that will help the team. If you have already some initiatives, then it can be converted to goals. I spent not more than 1month to define goals for the whole team.

▸ False, Positives
While using SMART, the team members were too focused on hygiene of the system. Even a slight mistake makes the metric go side ways and in-turn resulting a false notion of incomplete goal. This sometimes is frustrating.

In PACT, the focus is more on outcome. Each goal had a definition of done e.g. demonstrate the comparison of the tools, walk through of the documentation, show performance improvement of x% and so on. The end outcome were clearly visible and it didn’t had any dependency on a system. So no false-positive situation.

▸ Overheads
SMART goals had a huge overhead on system, processes, constant pressure of updating the system, following the processes. As a manager, even I had a huge overhead to continuously monitor for the freshness of the data in the systems.

PACT goals has lesser dependencies on the systems, so lesser overheads.

▸ Focus
SMART goals made the team more focused on the processes and outputs. This became almost monotonous at some point in time. Due to this the satisfaction of achieving a goal was lost.

PACT goals made the team being satisfied about achieving goals as it was focused on outcomes and in-turn how it added value back to the team.

▸ Smaller achievable milestones
SMART kind of makes you to say whether the goal was achieved or not; partial achievement of goals is not really a thing. This creates complexity in achieving a goal. One can breakdown the goal, but it may not be a true measurement of the overall goal.

PACT goals can be spread across different milestones, can be tracked at every step of the milestone, so it makes it easy when there is large goal to be achieved.

Conclusion

SMART is great when the right system and processes are in place. And most importantly there is a dedicated person in the team who is managing all the systems and processes.

PACT goals are less dependent on systems rather than focuses on outcome. The process overheads are lesser when compared to SMART goals.

PACT goals helped me to make the team to achieve the goals and as a Manager I was able to track the progress with ease.

Since PACT goals can be done in an iterative fashion, and it is continuous in nature, there was always satisfaction in achieving the intermediate milestones without loosing the focus on the long term vision of the goals.

Since the team started seeing results and value addition of their efforts in achieving goals, they became more and more hungry for taking on goals that helps the team.

In this way the team became high performing as there was continuous improvement in deliverables, performance of the code, quick adoption of new tools, improvements in turn around times.

For my team PACT goals are much more helpful, we never went back to SMART. Let me know in the comments section, what has been your experience as a manager while adopting SMART or PACT.

Happy management!