Totara Perform Open Discussions

User reports for Perform

 
Paul Roberts
User reports for Perform
di Paul Roberts - Thursday, 12 May 2022, 02:18
 

Hi all

Very new to perform (since March this year) and I can't seem to find any reports for perform that I might be able to allow access to our Management team.

We have very much a 'supply a fishing rod' approach to reporting, so use dashboards quite a lot enabling Managers to get their own information about their colleague's progress in Learn. I would like to set up some 'Appraisal' reports to enable HR Business Partners and our Audit Team to get an overview of progress/completion accross the business, but can't seem to find anything in embedded reports to do this.

I'm probably just being blind/dense, but if someone could switch the light on I'd be most grateful :)

Thanks in advance

Paul

Craig Eves
Re: User reports for Perform
di Craig Eves (Totara Support) - Thursday, 12 May 2022, 16:13
Gruppo Totara

Hi Paul

There are 4 user reports for Performance activities in Totara 16

  • Performance Participant Instance
  • Performance Participant Section
  • Performance Questions
  • Performance Subject Instance

If you go into the Content tab and the show by user section and tick the Record's for users direct reports and Show by users position section and select Staff at or below any of the user's assigned positions

Note the Performance Questions report doesn't have this option.

Regards



Richard Rudman
Re: User reports for Perform
di Richard Rudman - Thursday, 10 November 2022, 08:40
 

Hi Craig, 

Like Paul, we too are interested in the data available to managers in direct reports for performance activity responses. Currently managers aren't able to view activity responses submitted under a previous manager as far as we can tell. Ideally, we would like a report that shows response data that could be filtered by performance activity and restricted to those under the managers direct reports. I can see this information is available in the report source 'Performance User Reporting' but can't seem to clone and unhide the report without receiving errors. I presume this content is only available as an embedded report source? 

Do you know of any way round this problem and if not, are there plans to improve Performance reporting in future version of Totara do you know? 

Thanks

Richard 

Craig Eves
Re: User reports for Perform
di Craig Eves (Totara Support) - Thursday, 10 November 2022, 11:09
Gruppo Totara

Hi Richard

There have been some improvements to Performance activity reporting in the just released Totara 17 

This includes the addition of two capabilities

Report on a performance activity subject responses capability (mod/perform:report_on_subject_responses).

mod/perform:report_on_all_subject_responses capability exposes a link to the responses of all users in the Development block of the user profile or via Quick-access menu > Performance activity response data. This capability should therefore only be used for users who need to see site-wide performance data.

By allowing the report on subject responses  for the staff manager role the performance data is available to the manager



Craig Eves
Re: User reports for Perform
di Craig Eves (Totara Support) - Thursday, 10 November 2022, 12:36
Gruppo Totara

Hi Richard

Just to clarify - the new part in 17 isn't the permissions - these permissions have been there since  Totara13 

The part added in 17 is we've added a button on the Activities page that takes those with the permission to the response reporting area.


The other changes being that you can see the reports on screen in addition to being able to download them.

Regards


Jennifer Poole
Re: User reports for Perform
di Jennifer Poole - Thursday, 10 November 2022, 13:15
 

Hi Paul and Richard,


Having been involved with the team that developed this functionality, I thought I'd add a little bit more detail, especially regarding your questions around the report source.


So, to clarify:

  • Whichever version of Totara Perform you're on, it is possible to give managers access to their team's response data. Due to the sensitive nature of performance management data, we made the decision not to add the capability to the Staff Manager role by default, but leave it up to individual organisations to determine whether it was appropriate.
  • By assigning the 'mod/perform:report_on_subject_responses' capability to the Staff Manager role, it will give the manager access to all performance response data for their current team members (i.e. including data that was recorded before they became a team member reporting to this particular manager). This differs from what the manager has access to in their Activities area, which includes all activities they have been participants in (i.e. could include former team members).
  • The response data report that the manager has access to is 'pre-restricted' to their team members' data only (because the capability is applied in their team members' user context). Note that this means they may have access to response data in excess of what the participant view permissions allow, on activities where they are participants.
  • In versions 13-16, the manager will be able to access the reports via their Team page, once they have the appropriate capability. The text link in the sentence below the page heading will take them to all team members' data, whereas the links below each team member will take them to the data for that team member only.
  • In version 17, we have added the button link Craig mentioned on the Activities page to make it easier to find.
  • In v17, in addition to being able to download to CSV as previously, you can download to Excel or view the data as a report on screen. We've included a few multi-select filters to help managers more easily narrow down to the specific data they're interested in.


Richard, you are correct that the response data is only available as an embedded report. For performance reasons, it is not available as a report source, nor can a clone of the embedded report be used. The granularity of the data (one record per response per participant) means that the volume of data can rapidly grow to hundreds of thousands of records over time. The nature of the permissions checks across multiple contexts that would need to be applied when running a user report based on the source heavily impacts performance.

Andrew Metcalfe
Re: User reports for Perform
di Andrew Metcalfe - Thursday, 10 November 2022, 14:01
Gruppo Most Helpful Contributor 2022

Thanks for the detailed response Jennifer,

We're using T14 and will jump to T17 in the near future. Our organisation is mid-sized (circa 10k users) and I'm already concerned about the UI performance and functional issues in PERFORM. You've mentioned that features are now being held back for performance reasons and I feel that there are deeper architectural issues lurking here. What's the future of PERFORM's underlying architecture?

Phil Williscroft
Re: User reports for Perform
di Phil Williscroft - Thursday, 10 November 2022, 14:42
 

Hi Andrew.

I'm very very interested in specifics regarding these performance issues you see.  Jennifer's performance comments related to reporting and is an issue we need to solve.

However you have indicated you see functional performance issues.  If you can provide some specifics that would be fantastic. 

Richard Rudman
Re: User reports for Perform
di Richard Rudman - Friday, 11 November 2022, 08:11
 

Hi Jennifer,

Thanks for the information, this feature is exactly what we're looking for. I think I already know the answer to this follow-up question but I'll ask anyway, is there a way to limit the content a manager can see to a specific activity? Our staff record two different types of supervision, one of which doesn't involve the line manager at all. Ideally, we would like a manager to see all data relating to line management supervision but nothing else. 

thanks

Richard

Jennifer Poole
Re: User reports for Perform
di Jennifer Poole - Sunday, 13 November 2022, 13:07
 

Hi Richard,

Unfortunately, it's not possible to restrict access further by activity (it's either all data related to that subject-user, or none). It is, however, possible to filter down to just data related to a specific activity.

Useful feedback for Phil Williscroft (Perform product manager, also on this thread) though – I think we may have heard similar input from others.

Jennifer