Hi all,

For those of you unable to attend, the recording of the session 'How Totara Perform can revolutionise your performance management and enterprise productivity' is now available.

Please find below answers to those questions I didn't have time to respond to during the session.  Thank you again for everyone that joined this session and thank you to Totara Perform Product Manager Phil Williscroft for providing answers to some of your curlier questions.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to post right here in the Totara Perform Open Discussions forum.

Is there a sandbox site people can go into?

Is Perform also available in the new Totara app?

Creating comprehensive reporting across competencies and performance activities has been a big focus for Totara Perform.  I suggest having a look through the Academy courses on Totara Perform and checking out the Help Documentation and then if you have any further questions, please post them here in this forum.

Will the appraisal functionality tie together with the rest of the system? For example now you can review competencies and objectives and courses but you cannot set new objectives etc... within the appraisal. Will that change in V13 perform?

Totara Learn, Totara Engage and Totara Perform have been designed to work as stand-alone products or together as the Totara Talent Experience Platform.  You’ll see now in this first release (v13) a seamless navigation between all three products and a range of touchpoints (such as competencies, the learning catalogue, evidence bank etc).  As we continue to develop each of these products, we’ll be adding new ties and links between systems.

With multiple jobs assignments, are the [performance] activity settings (due date, frequency, etc.) per-job?

On a related note, when setting up your performance activity, you can also choose whether the user has one instance per job assignment or an instance for each job assignment.

Will you be able to assign to an individual?

Sure, if you wanted to. You can assign performance activities to Audiences, Positions and/or Organisations.  These groups can have one or many individual members.

Can Totara send reminder emails to Outlook?

For folks not at the session, I believe this question relates to the series of automated reminder messages you can generate for users assigned to a particular performance activity.

...and the answer is yes! Totara follows industry standards when sending notifications out via email, ensuring a high level of compatibility with mail clients including Outlook and Google mail.

As an added bonus, users can choose how they receive notifications across the system - so if they prefer to receive an Alert or Task on their Dashboard, then they can opt in as required.

If Individual Learning Plans connect to competencies (which they do in 12) doesn't that kind of connect to the appraisals?

One of the major changes to competencies across Totara 13 has been the removal of the dependency upon Learning Plans.  Not only does this mean Perform can be used as a stand-alone product, users can now also achieve competencies based on the completion courses not associated with a learning plan.  A note you will still be able to use learning plans and competencies together.

Can you have multiple groups of competences? i.e. leadership competencies group and another group with personal competencies?

You sure can!  You can either have multiple competency frameworks, parent/child competencies or you can group competencies together using Competency Types.  A picture (or two in this case) is worth a thousand words so posting a screenshot here of how you can group competencies together.  For more on this, please see the help documentation.

Can you link content completion in competencies to content in Totara Engage as well as courses in Totara Learn?

For this first release of Totara Perform we have developed competencies to use formal learning to demonstrate competency.  However the Talent Experience Platform is intentionally designed to enable a broad learning experience so extending competency to include informal learning is on our roadmap for future releases.

Does the competency profile break progress into the different frameworks or does it just show all competencies assigned to the individual regardless of framework?

Currently the competency profile displays competencies sorted by how it has been assigned (Assignment Type).  Tell us more about displaying by framework though...how would that be helpful to you and your organisation?

With multiple job assignments, would a manager be able to manually rate a competency not associated with the job they manage?

Yes , they could, however the risk of them doing so unintentionally would be fairly small given they can see how/why the competency was assigned.

Is there any skills gap functionality?

If you base a competency framework on the skills a user could, should and must have, then you could use the progress reporting across the competencies profile to highlight skill gaps. There is also comprehensive reporting where you can search for competencies and ratings by user/group.  

Does that competency assignment replace adding competencies to learning plans?

If you’re talking about the Learning plan achievement path...it sure does - nice spotting!  I’ve added a screenshot below for reference and to double check we’re on the same page.