Best practice forum (Archived)

Working with Performance Management Document

 
Andrew McMonagle
Working with Performance Management Document
by Andrew McMonagle - Monday, 30 September 2013, 8:56 AM
 

Hi Guys,

I am reading through the document and on page 98 its states the following:

"Note that activating an appraisal disables your ability to update stages, pages and questions and locks the list of assigned users. If a new user is added to one of the learner groups in the appraisal assignment, that user will not be added to the appraisal."

I understand the reasoning behind locking the ability to update stages, pages etc but would it be possible to have new users who meet the assignment criteria automatically assigned the appraisal? Or maybe there is a reason this is static?

Thanks

Andrew

Nathan Lewis
Re: Working with Performance Management Document
by Nathan Lewis - Monday, 30 September 2013, 1:40 PM
Group Totara

Hi Andrew.

I've already had a look at what would be needed to implement this. To simply add new users would not be too difficult, but there are other things to consider. What do we do with users that are included in the group (pos, org, aud), but who are missing a vital role (have no manager and manager is required to provide answers)? What do we do when a user leaves the group? What do we do if the appraisal period is almost finished and several stages are already past due date? What do we do if a user's manager changes. We've come up with a possible solution to these problems, but it really needs to be implemented all at once in a single feature, rather than in small pieces.

Our current idea (which may not be the same as what is finally implemented) is to scan for changes during cron and then process each situation based on some settings. Those settings might include options such as simply adding the user, ignoring them (useful if it is too late to add newcomers), resetting a user's appraisal stage and either leaving the entered data as-is or erasing it (when a user's manager has changed), generating an exception for a manager/administrator to manual decide what to do, and some other options, depending on the situation. We also need to decide if these settings are site-wide appraisal-specific or both.

We want to implement all of this together as a single feature improvement, rather than implementing a small part of it and then changing how it works at a later stage. I'm not sure when, or if, this will happen. My guess is that it will be included in Totara 2.6 at the latest, but I'm not sure if it could happen before then, as the policy is for the bi-weekly releases to included bug fixes and minor improvement while saving feature changes for major releases. Simon will be deciding if and when this gets implemented.

Nathan

Simon Coggins
Re: Working with Performance Management Document
by Simon Coggins - Wednesday, 2 October 2013, 4:50 PM
Group Totara

Hi Andrew,

Just to confirm, this is definitely on the roadmap but due to the complexities mentioned by Nathan we didn't have time to get it into the first version.

We'll be prioritising this feature along with other requested enhancements and will try to work on it as soon as we can. Because there are likely to be significant changes required to implement this we probably won't include it in a minor point release (2.5.x), so we'll be aiming for 2.6.

Simon

Daniel Bond
Re: Working with Performance Management Document
by Daniel Bond - Thursday, 3 October 2013, 1:10 AM
Group Most helpful contributor 2023

Of those features, the one that is going to be hardest to work around is the change of manager, hadn't even considered that the employee wouldn't be seemlessly transferred to their new manager. I suppose there would be a number of ways that organisations might want to deal with this eventuality, either finishing the appraisal and then starting a new one with the new manager, but at least having the option to transfer would be pretty vital I think. Maybe one to include in a 2.5.x release because we are aiming to implement Performance Management fairly quickly after 2.5 is released and this would represent a pretty major barrier.

Dan

Simon Coggins
Re: Working with Performance Management Document
by Simon Coggins - Thursday, 3 October 2013, 1:31 PM
Group Totara

Hi Dan,

We hear you, but with 2.5 release at the end of the month I'm afraid we need to focus on bug fixes of the existing functionality at this stage. We will look at adding some basic options in an early 2.5 point release.

Simon

Daniel Bond
Re: Working with Performance Management Document
by Daniel Bond - Friday, 3 January 2014, 3:45 AM
Group Most helpful contributor 2023

Hi,

Just checking in to see if there has been any movement towards developing the ability to change manager (and therefore reallocate an appraisal from the old manager to the new) for release in a 2.5 point release. If so, is there an approximate time-frame for this release, and if not is it going to definitely happen in 2.6? The logistics of assigning appraisals to staff groups based on when their last appraisal happened is going to be tricky enough, but if an employee can't then move mid-year and take their appraisal with them it's going to be a real problem.

Dan

Tim Newham
Re: Working with Performance Management Document
by Tim Newham - Tuesday, 19 November 2013, 1:49 AM
Group Partners

Just a quick +1 from me (on behalf of a number of clients who asked me about this yesterday at a usergroup meeting). Adding users to existing "live" appraisal flows is really important, as is an appraisal completion date based on some user-related field (in our case, x days before pay increment date). We would - while I'm here making bold requests - like to allow an individual to start an appraisal before they have a manager allocated, too. In our bigger clients, there's no central record of who manages whom so forcing "all users must have a manager before we can activate this appraisal" can be a problem.

Thanks!

Tim

Craig Eves
Re: Working with Performance Management Document
by Craig Eves (Totara Support) - Tuesday, 19 November 2013, 2:39 PM
Group Totara

There is an appraiser position that may be able to be used where a manager doesn't exist. The appraisal could be made live as long as the appraiser is able to complete the appraisal.

The flexible appraisal completion date has been added as a feature request - the use case for us being for a probation type appraisal based on certain number of days after start date. Having the flexible appraisal date idea would also help with the ability to add users after appraisal is made live as review dates for individuals wouldn't have expired.

A question from me regarding the Feedback - this seems to be an Appraisal without the message capability so not sure why you couldn't create the Feedback using the Appraisal or are they going to be different in the longer term.