Re: Performance Reviews

Ron, I agree that it is unclear... but let me see if I can make it better, then if I can, I'll suggest changes to Jeff (He and I had traded emails earlier on clearing up the article).
Imagine these notes under the headings as such:
The Process Takes Three Meetings to Initialize
(In the Review Template linked down below, this section refers to the "Individual Performance" part of that Review Template)
and..The Review Ratings(In the Review Template linked down below, this section refers to the "Development Team Rating..." part of that Review Template)
While this may not be the best way to fix the article -- does the above help your "shared understanding" of how the review process works?

(One other "hole" is who does the "Company Rating" on the Review Template)

-------
Charles Bradley
Chief Executive Officer
Professional Scrum Trainer
http://AgileSoftwareTraining.com
Agile Software - Training, Consulting, Coaching

      From: "Ron Jeffries [email protected] [SCRUMDEVELOPMENT]" <[email protected]>
 To: [email protected] 
 Sent: Sunday, May 31, 2015 4:06 PM
 Subject: Re: [SCRUMDEVELOPMENT] Performance Reviews
   
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Hi Charles,

On May 26, 2015, at 9:51 PM, Charles Bradley - Professional Scrum Trainer and Coach [email protected] [SCRUMDEVELOPMENT] <[email protected]> wrote:
I'm not seeing what you're talking about.  Can you be more specific?

Reluctantly, here are some thoughts. Reluctant, because ideally they’d be addressed privately to Jeff, not to this group. But you did ask.
In essence the core algorithm of the article comes down to:
   
   - Employee rates self;
   - Employee and reviewer discuss ratings;
   - Reviewer rates employee;
   - Employee rating stands.

At this moment the reader is all WTF, the employee rating stands??. What follows doesn’t help alleviate the WTF.
In particular this section:

The higher rating supercedes the lower. If the reviewer gives a 4 and the team gives a 7, it is a 7 and so forth. This review is a form of 360 degree feedback where the review process is designed to surface gross disparities between market perception, customer perception, company perception, team perception, reviewer perception, and individual employee perception of their performance. Gross disparities are rare and should be dealt with on an exception basis.

… seems to be saying that there is a team rating. Are we talking about a single employee, rated by their team? If so, there’s something missing above? Are we talking suddenly about how to rate a whole team (which could be a good review idea)? If so, then the first part should have said “Team rates itself”, etc ...
The quoted section goes on to refer to a number of “perceptions”: market, customer, company, team, reviewer, individual. (Likely this should have been a new paragraph.) Either way,t the procedure itself only addresses what the reviewer and the individual do. Somehow a whole bunch of people seem to have popped into the equation. Compiler explodes with “undefined term” messages.

Naturally, I can imagine an answer. the problem is, I can imagine many disparate ones, mostly wrong.
One candidate answer is: “either the employee or reviewer may make [un]substantiated claims about the views of other individuals or groups regarding the employee’s performance”. If I guess that, which seems a possibly sensible thing to do, I’m still left with a huge gap in understanding how those claims would be created, used, assessed, or adjudicated. It also puts quite a burden on the other people involved, since in fairness, the employee and the reviewer should both be engaged in getting this information. (Together, one would have hoped, but together isn’t part of this scheme.)
Another answer might be “use common sense”, which makes the questioner go away but each questioner goes away with a different answer in his head, since “common sense” is never common and often not sense. 
Overall, in my opinion, the article leaves too much to the imagination, which means that this advice will be used, if at all, in random unintended ways. The rubber doesn’t meet the road. 
Ron Jeffriesronjeffries.comIf not now, when? -- Rabbi Hillel