IT Staff Performance Review

Export close rate, average resolution time, reopen rate, and tickets-per-tech from ConnectWise PSA, Autotask, Halo, or whichever PSA the team runs. Filter to the review period and break out by priority (P1/P2/P3) — averaging across all tickets hides the SLA story for high-priority work.

From NinjaOne, Datto RMM, N-able, or Kaseya VSA, export agent-health metrics, patch compliance percentages, and after-hours alert handling for the technician's assigned client base or device cohort.

Send the self-assessment template at least five business days before the meeting. Ask for concrete examples — a SEV1 they led, a runbook they wrote — not abstract self-ratings.

Pull CSAT survey scores from the PSA's post-resolution survey, plus any direct feedback from manager-level stakeholders. Note response volume — a 100% CSAT on three responses is not the same signal as 92% on eighty.

Open last cycle's review document. For each goal, mark met / partial / missed with evidence. Goals that were never measurable in the first place are a coaching note for how this cycle's goals should be written.

Compare response and resolution times against the contractual SLA — typically 15 minutes response for P1, 4 hours for P2, next business day for P3. A pattern of P3 misses is usually workload distribution; P1 misses are an escalation or staffing problem.

Plot mean time to resolution by month or by quarter. Look for trend, not snapshot — a tech whose MTTR rose 40% over six months on a stable ticket mix is sliding; a tech who took on harder tickets and held flat is improving.

Pull the change log and confirm changes followed the CAB-approved process: RFC submitted, peer review, rollback plan, post-change validation. Off-script changes during the window are a coachable failure even if the change succeeded.

From PagerDuty or Opsgenie, review acknowledge times, escalations, and any pages that fell through. After-hours fatigue is a real risk — repeated late-night pages on the same runbook usually mean the alert threshold needs tuning, not that the on-call is failing.

For Tier 1, look at over-escalation (kicking solvable tickets to Tier 2) and under-escalation (sitting on a P2 that should have moved). For Tier 2/3, look at handoff quality back to Tier 1 with documented resolution steps.

Walk through the technologies the role demands — Entra ID and Intune for endpoint, Veeam or Datto for backup, Meraki or FortiGate for firewall, the team's EDR (CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Defender). Score each as proficient, working, or needs-development with named examples from the cycle.

Pick three to five hard tickets from the cycle and walk through the troubleshooting trail. Look for hypothesis-driven debugging, log evidence, and avoidance of the common antipattern of restarting services until the symptom goes away without root-cause analysis.

Confirm current status on role-relevant certs — CompTIA Network+/Security+, Microsoft MS-102 / AZ-104, AWS SysOps, Cisco CCNA, vendor-specific (Fortinet NSE, Veeam VMCE). Three-year cycles for most; CompTIA's CE program needs CEUs logged, not retake.

Count net-new runbooks authored, existing runbooks improved, and PowerShell / Python / Bash scripts contributed to the team's automation library. A senior tech who solves the same recurring ticket forty times without writing the script is a coaching item.

Book exam dates, allocate study time on the schedule, and confirm the budget code for vouchers and training materials. Letting a Security+ lapse on a CMMC or DoD-adjacent contract creates a contractual problem, not just a personal-development one.

Spot-check the technician's recent documentation entries for accuracy, completeness, and currency. Stale credentials and missing diagrams are the most common gotchas — and the ones that bite hardest during an outage when the on-call has never seen the system.

Pull a few examples of vendor support cases (Microsoft, Cisco TAC, Veeam) and cross-team escalations. Look for clear problem statements, attached logs, and follow-through — not the antipattern of opening a vendor case and abandoning it for two weeks.

For Tier 2/3 staff, mentorship is part of the role. Look at over-the-shoulder pairing on hard tickets, knowledge-share sessions, and whether escalations come back with a teaching note or just the resolution.

For 24x7 NOC or follow-the-sun teams, shift handoff is a leading indicator of incidents. Audit a week of handoff notes — open SEV2s, in-progress changes, watch items — for completeness.

Block 60 minutes, private room or video. Lead with the data — SLA, MTTR, CSAT, named tickets — before opinions. Reserve the last 15 minutes for the employee's input on workload, blockers, and career direction.

Two to four goals, each measurable. Concrete examples: pass AZ-104 by end of Q3, author runbooks for the top five recurring P2s, drive P1 MTTR below 90 minutes. Avoid vague goals like "improve communication" that can't be scored next cycle.

Record the overall rating, the employee's reaction or rebuttal, and capture signatures from both manager and employee. Disagreement on rating is fine and should be documented; surprise on rating is a manager failure earlier in the cycle.

Upload the signed PDF to the HRIS (BambooHR, Rippling, ADP, Workday) and confirm retention per company policy. Keep a working copy in the IT manager's review folder for next-cycle reference.

Partner with HR on the formal PIP template. Each milestone needs a measurable target — close-rate floor, SLA threshold, named ticket categories — with weekly check-ins and a clear consequence at day 90 if targets are missed.