Create a Peer Review Group.
Posted 09.08.2011
Setting up a Peer Review Group with your team, entire company or with a group of professionals in your industry will often provide invaluable insight into the work that you do.
What is a peer review group?
Simply put... A Peer Review Group is a team of people that have roughly the same degree of skill, that review and provide constructive criticism on each others work.
Who should be invited?
Share with those on your own skill level...
The peer in peer review is all about sharing and reviewing your work with those at or near your own level of skill. The advantage of this peer review process is that it encourages communication, growth and understanding among members of your group. Peer review will often expose habits that even the most creative people fall into, and inspire new vision in even the most jaded professional.
Learn from those more skilled than you...
Ultimately you are looking for people you respect and who have enough skill in your industry to challenge you to become better.
Lead those with growing skills...
It's a good idea to add some less skilled members to the team. As you teach and lead these members, you are forced to examine your own processes. People learning a craft haven't developed the hang-ups that more seasoned professionals have, so they will often create innovative solutions to challenges, these solutions and innovations sometimes create opportunities that you may have otherwise missed. To some degree, you do need to keep the group at a peer level, if you are having to teach everyone you are not being challenged, and if everyone is far more advanced then yourself you may become frustrated, or the more skilled team members may become bored and unresponsive.
Who should not be invited to the group?
Those unable to accept criticism are abusive, manipulative or condescending.
In some instances you will have to avail the group to anyone relevant to it. For example; if the peer review group consists entirely of members of a team, excluding a team member would be at minimum rude and may even constitute a hostile work environment. That issue aside... Team members should be good tempered and well mannered. Since the objective of the peer review group is to review and provide constructive criticism, your group members must to be thick skinned enough to deal with that criticism, and eloquent enough to provide critique without seeming abusive.
You may or may not want to have your boss or client be part of the peer review, they are by definition not your peer. They may however be your peer by skill, so you will need to examine your relationship with people who pay you for your work.
If the members of the group are uncomfortable showing their work and critical suggestions with others, then you lower the effectiveness of the group.
Scheduling Peer Review Group Meetings.
This really comes down to time, and project size. If the members of your group produce a reviewable product only 2 times a year, then meeting weekly is unlikely to prove productive. Conversely, you don't want to meet every day because you won't get any work done to review. I like the idea or meeting between every week and once a month depending on schedules and the amount of work the group members produce in a given time.
Also related to deciding when and where to hold your meetings you need to set some ground rules on how long the meeting should last, and how long, and how many items any team member can submit for review. To be a member you don't need to submit an item for review every time, but there should be some set minimum, otherwise that person isn't acting in the spirit of a peer review group.
How do you get a peer review group started?
This is the easy part... well kind of... A good way to get a group started is to send an email to the people that you would like to have in the peer review group asking them to review some of your work. Also add to the email the suggestion that it might be nice to have a peer review group and ask if they would be interested.
There is a good chance that you will have at least a few people interested in the group, then you just have to coordinate the time and location to meet.
Another option if you are interested in creating a peer review group at work is suggest it to your boss. The opportunity for employees to become better at their jobs is usually an attractive idea. You might even get a pat on the back for the suggestion.
How should a peer review group meet?
When possible, its best to meet in person so that you have the benefit of visual cues as you discuss your work with other group members, but you can really handle this based on your group needs and location. Obviously if part of your team is in a remote location(s) then meeting in person may be an issue. This doesn't mean though, that you can't have the local portion of your team meet in person.
If you do work that can be easily demonstrated online, it will be much easier to handle remote meetings than if your product is something that must be manipulated to understand or appreciate.
Another issue concerns complexity. If your product is program code, a compilation of research or some written document, it may not make sense to do the presentation of the product at the same time you have the peer group meet. It's still a good idea to have a face to face meeting with those you are reviewing or being reviewed by, but it may not make sense to have people read through something that would be better processed over the course of hours or days. In this case, some suggestions and reviews materials may be far more useful as additions to a document, links to relevant information or snippets of code.
Suggestions
Informal Peer review groups can often be found online, I suggest joining one or two of these groups in addition to your face to face peer review group. Don't spread yourself too thin, if a group isn't meeting your needs, leave it and look for another group. If you try to juggle too many groups you will get little from any of them.