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Appraisal stage cannot be marked complete until all potential contributors have accessed the appraisal and marked the stage complete

 
Maurice Moore
Appraisal stage cannot be marked complete until all potential contributors have accessed the appraisal and marked the stage complete
by Maurice Moore - Wednesday, 11 December 2013, 6:40 PM
 

I have been experiencing an issue with an appraisal. Specifically, even though a role is not required to complete an element in a stage, it is not possible for the stage to be marked complete unless the optional role either completes the stage or clicks the "Complete Stage" button.  

I want to be able to give an appraiser or 'managers manager' the opportunity to comment on an appraisal but for it to be possible to complete the stage without both appraiser and 'managers manager' having to mark a stage complete before "anyone" can move onto the next stage. No locking has been applied to any part of the appraisal.

It does not appear to be a permissions issue as I can find no Appraisal Completion permission to set.

To reproduce the issue I built a very simple two stage appraisal. One page on each stage with a single multi choice question. The first element has the following permissions.

 

Learner and Manager complete the first stage but cannot move to second stage until the Manager's Manager marks stage 1 as complete (whether they answer the question or not).

Expected behaviour. I had expected that the choice for a stage being marked as complete (or not, & possibly reopened) by a manager would be available.

As an interim solution, I will limit input to any stage to those that must complete elements and set up another stage for the appraiser or manager's manager review.

Any other ideas would be welcomed!

Maurice

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nathan Lewis
Re: Appraisal stage cannot be marked complete until all potential contributors have accessed the appraisal and marked the stage complete
by Nathan Lewis - Wednesday, 11 December 2013, 8:12 PM
Group Totara

Hi Maurice.

We thought about this during development and it was implemented like this intentionally. I'll explain why.

Progress from one stage to the next is done automatically when the last user with any questions has clicked the "Complete Stage" button.

If we instead decided to automatically progress to the next stage when all users with _required_ questions have clicked "Complete Stage" then we'd cause several problems:

  • If there is only one person with required questions and they complete the stage then they could deny the other users the opportunity to answer their optional questions.
  • If there are no people with required questions (as in your example) the system would either skip the stage altogether, or we would have to program it to move to the next stage after the first person completes the stage, which again denies the other users the opportunity to answer the stage.

An option that might work is to implement manual stage progression. This would require an interface which allows some user to click a button and say "This stage is complete, go on to the next". This solution wasn't implemented for several reasons. There would have to be some way of controlling who could push this button. How do they know if the other users have had the opportunity to submit their optional answers? (I haven't spent a lot of time thinking this option through, but I have the feeling that we would discover more problems related to this.) These things would require quite a lot of work to implement and would greatly increase the complexity of setting up and using the appraisals. 

As it is, the interface makes it clear which users need to complete the stage before the appraisal will progress to the next. This should allow the users who are waiting to get in contact with the people they are waiting on and ask them to have a look and submit their answers (or just click Next/Complete Stage if they are not required to answer). Also, people can easily see the status of their active reports and can see when they need to contribute.

If you can think of any improvements which we could make then please let us know. If you were to get some custom work done to implement a "Go to next stage" button or anything else related to appraisals then I'd be keen to review it and see if it would be suitable for integration into core Totara (you'd have to get advice from someone else about how contributions to Totara works, I'm just a dev :).

Nathan

Maurice Moore
Re: Appraisal stage cannot be marked complete until all potential contributors have accessed the appraisal and marked the stage complete
by Maurice Moore - Thursday, 12 December 2013, 12:20 PM
 

Thanks for the explanation Nathan, very clear. I had reached the same conclusions about why the system had been implemented the way it had so it's good to know I hadn't misunderstood the intent.

To solve my problem, I've modified my appraisal design so that only the learner and manager can contribute to the first two stages. I've then introduced a third stage where the Appraiser and Manager's Manager can contribute. We shall see how well it works!

It's great to have this functionality - thanks to the team for the development effort.