Assessing a Product or Service and providing feedback
Generally a ‘Customer Satisfaction Survey’ form requires us as customers to give our feedback on the products / services we receive. Such feedback, basically helps the supplier company in analyzing the weak points and improve its products / services. Similarly the employees who are Human Capital of an Organization also need to be evaluated from time-to-time to reward them for their services in improving the business and to develop them where they need to be improved. Such evaluations could be from various dimensions depending on type of jobs they perform such as a Sales Person while he is evaluated for his “selling abilities”, he is also evaluated for his “persuasion skills” along with “communication” and other skills. These evaluations could be from “Customers” and/or from his “Supervisors”. The feedback could sometime be Qualitative while at other times be Quantitative. The frequency of such assessments is dependent, mostly, on type of jobs. Some jobs require regular assessments while for others yearly evaluation may work fine.
Appraisal Process as a whole
Having stated in my previous blog, published here Need for Appraisalthere could be different scenarios to implement an Appraisal System including the above-mentioned example. Appraisal System in SAP’s HR Application – Personnel Development basically helps in Developing the Appraisal Models and Creating & Evaluating those Appraisals. Since I got a chance to explore the application quite thoroughly I thought to share my learning with fellows on SCN. I decided to split the topic in 2/3 blogs to provide better overview of an application, as I understood it. So the first part “Need for Appraisal” just described the Appraisal, my approach in learning the application and few scenarios with which a layman could understand the concept of Appraisal. The second part “Setting-up an Appraisal Model” – my current blog, describes the steps needed to configure an Appraisal Template. I’m going to explain each of the steps briefly you need to know to set-up a basic Appraisal Model. The third blog & most probably last in Appraisal series would explain the end-user aspect where Appraisals are prepared, held and completed. If needed, I may expand the discussion further to few other topics related to Appraisal Systems. So here we go!
Fundamentals of Appraisal
What do you need to know before you set-up an Appraisal Model? This section describes the prerequisites:
1) Who is the Appraiser and Appraisee? In case of Customer Satisfaction Survey form, you’re Appraiser as a Customer while there could be multiple objects as Appraisee such as The Waiter, the Meal, The Restaurant and so on.
2) What type of Appraisal you want to define? It could be one-to-one such as a Supervisor Appraising his employees. Or it could be multi-directional where a Supervisor, Subordinates, Colleagues, Customers etc can Appraise a Person. The first type of Appraisal, in SAP Terminology, is Individual Appraisal while the second type is Multi-Source Appraisal.
3) What is your Criteria of Evaluation? You may have varied Criterion and you may group them. A group Soft Skills, for instance, could be a Criteria Group, having multiple skills; communication, customer-facing, presentation etc as individual Criterion.
4) What scales do you want to use to Rate the Criteria? It could be “yes/no” where an employee / person possesses a certain skill or not. Or it could be a range 1-5 for instance to rate level of expertise for certain criteria.
5) Which criteria have more weight than the others? For instance for a public-speaking role, you may want to rank an individual higher for his communication skills than another skill. Thus, you may have defined both skills as two different criterion but you would give different rating to one of those skills.
6) How to calculate the Appraisal Results? You may like to Add the points or like to take an average. There could be some different possibility altogether.
7) In which sequence the elements of appraisal template should appear? You may have some priority for the assessment, therefore it should be known.
😎 Which criterion use the scales and which use ONLY the Notes. There could be some criteria where you want to put your comments in addition to selecting a drop down rating.
There are other attributes as well, with respect to the ‘look’ of appraisal template such as what information you want to display and which one you want to hide. You may fine-tune your Appraisal as nicely as your paper-based template with an exception of manual process 🙂
Setting-up the Template
Once you’ve the requirements – the minimum are mentioned above, you can configure a template. How you do so is described here:
Appraisal Elements
In the Appraisal Catalog – the central place to create your Appraisal Templates
1) Create a Category of Appraisals within Category Groups which are already there (including Personnel Appraisals, Course Appraisals etc). These categories are used to classify the Appraisal Templatetypes so the Standard Templates could be one category while Multisource or 360 Appraisal could be another category.
2) Within category, define an Appraisal Template – the Appraisal form you usually see & fill in to give your feedback.
3) To group your individual criterion create acriteria group.
4) Under the criteria groups, create criterion.
Settings
Each of the above would require you to maintain some settings. These settings are within the following tab pages:
1) Description: where you define the appraisal template, a criteria group or a criteria depending on the element of Appraisal.
2) Layout: the look & feel of appraisal template, you may like to display something while wanting to hide few things. You could do these here.
3) Columns: to select the columns you want to display in your appraisal. A template may have more than one columns.
4) Columns Access: to allow access to different objects involved in appraisal process.
5) Value Description: to describe the scale values. You may have a scale 1-5 and you may like to describe what does 1-5 mean.
6) Element Access: to restrict access to different elements in an Appraisal.
7) Roles: to choose which roles are involved in the appraisal process.
😎 Processing: to define follow-up processing which means after an appraisal process is complete what would be the next step.
9) Status: to define & adjust the statuses in an appraisal process. After filling an appraisal, does it require another approval for instance? It could be defined here.
AND that’s it. You could set-up a basic Appraisal Template using the above guidelines. Obviously there are many a things you’ve to do in order to fine-tune the Appraisal Model which you would observe as soon as you start working with Appraisal Catalog.
