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