Best practice forum (Archived)

Personal goals not showing in report?

I think I came across an issue but want to make sure what's the expected behavior. On Totara 2.5.1.

There are several company goals and user that have them assign to them.

In addition, at least one user has created a personal goal.

Created a report based on Goal Status report source. Only the company goals appear on that report.

Added a goal history link field to the report. Clicking it for a user that has personal goals sent me to the prefiltered report with their goals. However only company goals appear on that person's report.

That report has a filter with goal type (two possible values - company or personal). When filtering for personal, no goal appears.

When viewing the embedded goal status history report, the perosnal goals do appear.

Is this intentional?

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Hi Amir,

That is the currently expected behaviour at the moment, although we do have an enhancement ticket to add personal goals to reports we didn't implement it for the initial release.

One reason we didn't include it is that I'm not sure if it actually makes sense to include them for reporting purposes. Since each personal goal is unique it's obviously not going to make a lot of sense in the goal summary report.

There's more of a case for including them in the goal details report but the other factor is that personal goals we really designed to be "personal" (between the staff member and their manager) so including them in a site wide report might not be appropriate.

Interested to hear other people's views on this.

Not sure how the goal type filter ended up in the goal status history source!

Simon

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I do agree that personal goals should remain "personal", and be exposed to the user and the managers/appraisers involved in goal appraisals only.

Therefore, I would suggest removing the confusing filter from the embedded report.

Amir

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Okay, we'll do that in the next release.

Simon

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Hi Simon and Amir,

Actually I disagree - personal goals aren't personal in the sense of "private/confidential", they are just things that are assigned to a particular individual. So it may well be useful for a manager's manager (or even someone higher up the hierarchy) to see them. Particularly in the more centrist/controlling sort of organisations.

Please don't remove them from the report - or at least give us some option to show/hide the filter.

Tim

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Ah, the challenges of pleasing everyone :-)

Currently there are three goal related report sources:

Goal Summary

This shows aggregated scale values for each company goal for 1 specific goal framework. Personal goals are not shown. I think this one is fine as is, I really don't think it makes sense to display personal goals when there will only ever be 1 scale value listed.

Goal Status

This lists one user/goal combination per row. This currently also only shows company goal data (not personal).

Goal Status History

The intention of this report is that it would be the same as Goal Status, but including past values. However it turns out this report does include personal goals in some cases. Clicking the "Status History" link limits the report to only show history for that one goal item (which is always a company goal). If you remove the "item_and_scope" parameter from the url (or create a new report manually and view that) then all goals are shown including personal goals.

So the three options I see are:

1. Add personal goals to Goal Status to make it consistent with Goal Status History

2. Remove personal goals from Goal Status History to make it consistent with Goal Status

3. Add a configuration setting which determines if Personal goals appear in both reports or not.

Obviously 3 will make everyone happy - but it does require extra development, adds to the complexity and creates more code to manage and maintain. In general I prefer to avoid creating new configuration settings unless really necessary.

Tim, note that any user can still be given direct access to a user's "My goals" page to view the personal goals via permissions, here we're just talking about the ability to do site-wide reporting on personal goals.

Does anyone else have any thoughts or views on how we should resolve this?

Simon

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