I am anticipating that I'll get a negative review this year. It's my first year at the company, and I've faced some really hard problems.

I was hired into a fairly senior engineer position, working solo on a project with some juniors from another team periodically contributing, though they are not part of my team. I think the expectation was that I would somehow turn around this project and get the others to follow my lead, but it hasn't worked out that way. I've had trouble getting along with some of my coworkers. They're very inexperienced and it's been hard getting them to follow my lead on basic things like testing and architecture. I've also had to do the work of three people due to our hiring budget for the year. We've also had very high costs and usability problems due to the way the system was originally built. In general, management is not happy with this system.

I think I'm being blamed for all of this, despite not being the one that made these decisions, because the system falls under my jurisdiction. I'm fairly sure I have negative marks, though I don't really feel I've been given a fair shot, as I feel I am a victim of circumstances. At this company we have opportunities to do 360 reviews, where you get feedback from coworkers throughout the year. I opted not to do this. Now we will have our regular annual performance review. It's been a few years since I had this kind of formal review and I'm a bit nervous, especially given that the reputation of the project is not so good.

How can I best prepare for the review? Have you ever received a negative review? How does management respond? Did you improve on the next review? How is performance evaluated? Is it based on metrics (like LOC) or something more subjective?