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Defining 'Exceeding Expectations': A Strategic Approach to Proving Value as an SES Engineer
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Conclusion
- Deep Dive into the Presentation Material
- Why I'm Giving This Talk
- What Does "Exceeding Expectations" Mean?
- How to Achieve "Exceeding Expectations"
- Benefits of Doing This
- Why I'm Making This Presentation
- Thoughts
Introduction
This article's main argument is how to concretize and embody our company's mission of "exceeding expectations" within the constraints of Staffing/Engineering Service (SES).
Throughout my career, transitioning from sales to engineering, I have valued the idea that it's not "value is recognized as a result of achieving sales" but rather "sales follow as a result of providing value".
This initiative applies this mindset not to customers, but to our own SES business.
Why is "concretizing expectations" necessary?
Clarifying evaluation criteria and aligning the perceptions of members and evaluators is not just administrative work.
"Concretizing expectations" is necessary to solve the structural challenges unique to SES, as listed below:
- Because projects differ for each member, there tends to be variation in the quality and quantity of achievable outcomes
- Although the company wants to connect project outcomes to internal evaluations, it's difficult to define evaluation criteria
- As a result, evaluations are swayed by the evaluator's skills and mindset, and the content of other members' projects, making it difficult to receive fair evaluations
Additionally, while we emphasize the benefit of "easier to get promoted" to members,
we believe it leads to the long-term growth of the entire company.
- Increased Motivation: A fair evaluation system encourages autonomous learning.
- Improved Matching Accuracy: Visualization of skills enables assignment to more suitable projects.
- Growth Cycle: Improved retention and company growth attract even more talented individuals.
In this article, based on internal lightning talk materials, I will discuss "building a foundation" to minimize evaluation discrepancies and enable members to proactively demonstrate value.
Conclusion
- Leverage the task-based nature of work to clarify and break down "the tasks required by the project" and "what is generally expected of that role in the project," identifying the differences.
- Achieving these differences is precisely what "exceeding expectations" means.
- Based on the above, align on how to achieve "exceeding expectations" during the initial goal-setting meeting, and appeal quantitatively during the year-end evaluation meeting.
Deep Dive into the Presentation Material
Why I'm Giving This Talk
"Exceeding Expectations"
It's a great mission, isn't it?
I feel it's a very rational mission designed to generate results beyond what the customer expects, and in return, lead to higher unit prices.
However, how would you respond if you were asked this in an evaluation meeting?
- "How did you achieve 'exceeding expectations'?"
- "What is the 'evidence' that you truly 'exceeded expectations'?"
Even if you have appeal points such as proactive actions or gratitude from customers,
it's very difficult to convert them into "results" that evaluators will accept.
This is because, in SES, tasks are divided per project.
It's rare for evaluators and evaluatees to be on the same project, and the granularity of results differs for each project.
Therefore, even if you try to reflect on-site results in evaluations, internal evaluation criteria cannot be defined,
and as a result, evaluations tend to be determined by vague relative assessments.
This "difficulty in demonstrating evidence" is what I believe causes evaluation discrepancies.
This time, to overcome this structural barrier from the bottom up, I propose updating the definition of "exceeding expectations" to allow for demonstrable evidence.
What Does "Exceeding Expectations" Mean?
As an approach, I thought about verbalizing what "exceeding expectations" means by delving deeper into the definitions of words,
and establishing a common understanding.
What is 'expectation'?
What is 'expectation' in business?
What is 'result'?
What is 'value'?
Summarizing these definitions, I believe "exceeding expectations" can be defined as follows:
We defined "exceeding expectations" as producing results that contribute to the company's desired values of "sales" and "customer satisfaction" beyond what the customer expects through our work.
How to Achieve "Exceeding Expectations"
However, I believe that direct involvement in "sales" and "customer satisfaction" is mainly handled by front-end operations, and it is difficult for engineers to directly generate them.
Engineers at in-house development companies can be at the forefront, fulfilling customer requests, and generating sales by creating systems that are the source of revenue.
However, engineers belonging to SES companies primarily work on a task-based approach, which makes it difficult for them to directly impact "sales" and "customer satisfaction."
Therefore, to enable SES engineers to create value, this approach aims to verbalize the "roles" assigned to their positions and concretize "expectations," thereby identifying what additional actions can achieve "exceeding expectations."
This means leveraging the task-based nature of SES work to identify the difference between the tasks required by the current project and the roles generally expected of that position by verbalizing and breaking them down into elements. Achieving this difference enables "exceeding expectations."
As a concrete example, I'm using an MLOps project I'm currently involved in.
The role required by the project was "operation and maintenance of existing models," which I classified as "within expectations," and other tasks as "beyond expectations."
Since the ability generally required of MLOps is to continuously operate and improve models without breaking them, I defined:
By comparing this with the project's role, I concluded that "exceeding expectations" can be achieved if I can operate models without breaking them while also implementing model improvements.
Benefits of Doing These
By breaking down roles into elements and verbalizing expectations, I believe there are benefits such as:
- Increased productivity: What needs to be done becomes clear.
- Improved visibility: What you have accomplished becomes concrete and visible.
- Enhanced explainability: It becomes easier to explain what you did and why, which is also effective for career changes.
In fact, after verbalizing these, it became clear how to proceed, which led to a reduction in compute costs of over 5 million yen.
Moreover, by achieving the company's mission, internal evaluations will naturally improve.
I believe that this verbalization can minimize evaluation discrepancies arising from the structural issues of SES, as mentioned in the challenges, and lead to quantitative evaluations.
Why am I making this presentation?
What I want to achieve are the following two things:
- Improvement of the compensation system
- Mitigation of the "project gacha" (random assignment of projects)
These issues are common across the entire SES industry, which operates under a subcontracting structure. Even with shallow business channels, there's a limit to unit prices. As long as there's variation in the unit prices employees can secure, it's difficult to raise salaries. And because projects depend on luck, there's the problem of not being able to form a career effectively.
By having all members implement this initiative, we aim to define evaluation criteria from the bottom up and standardize evaluations.
In the medium to long term, by using evaluation criteria rooted in the organization, we want to create an environment where salaries can be raised across the board and high-performing individuals are clearly identified, making it easier to assign them to desired projects, also as a retention measure.
Ultimately, by achieving these, we believe it will lead to improved retention and make the company attractive to high-potential inexperienced individuals, thereby contributing to the company's growth.
Although I don't have the authority to create systems, I believe that company culture won't take root through top-down initiatives alone; employee commitment is essential. Therefore, as a member, I hope to lay the groundwork from below.
As a result of creating the value of "standardized evaluation," I aim to achieve "improvement of the compensation system" and "mitigation of the project gacha."
Impressions
Initially, I focused on maximizing customer value, but gradually the definition of "value" expanded, and I feel that my capabilities have broadened as a result.
Lately, I've come to think that having "my own opinion" is crucial in work.
AI is dramatically changing our environment, making it possible to find answers to anything we look up. In this context, what is the value that humans create?
- Guaranteeing the validity of knowledge?
- Guiding AI to ask questions to get desired results?
- Negotiating with customers?
I believe each of these is correct, but vaguely, I feel uncomfortable if the primary source of value seems to reside solely with AI.
Therefore, to the greatest extent possible, I believe that having "my own opinion" is an essential element for bringing the primary source of value back to myself.
I hope this article can serve as a reference, showing that "my own opinion" doesn't necessarily have to be correct, unique, or impactful, but can simply be something like this.
Going forward, I intend to continue providing value to both my own company and client companies, striving to generate an even greater impact.
Discussion