Performance activity progress and status transitions

Progress status

Completion of performance activities by participants is tracked on a number of levels, and indicated by the 'progress' status. On a participant section, it indicates whether responses for all required questions have been submitted. On a participant instance, it indicates whether all sections have been successfully submitted. On a subject instance, it indicates whether all responding participants' instances are complete.

Typically, an item will progress from Not started > In progress > Complete.

Participant section

Definitions:

Progress status transition, in an ordinary workflow, is triggered by a participant's action:

Whenever a section's status updates, it triggers aggregation across all section statuses to determine the participant instance's status.

Participant instance

Definitions:

Progress status transition, in an ordinary workflow:

Whenever a participant instance's status updates, it triggers aggregation across all participant instance statuses to determine the subject instance's status.

Subject instance

Definitions:

Progress status transition, in an ordinary workflow:

Availability

Definitions

Availability status indicates whether or not responses can be submitted and/or modified on a section.

The following, then, only refers to sections where a participant can respond. While it is possible to have an entire participant instance in which the participant can only view, it is not possible to have an entire subject instance where all participant instances are in this state (for an activity to be activated, it must contain, on every section, respondable elements and at least one participant relationship with permission to respond).

On a participant instance:

On a subject instance:

Status transition

All sections and instances have availability set to Open on creation. If the setting Automatic closure has On completion enabled, then when a section or instance changes status to Complete, the availability status will change to Closed. Regardless of this setting, it is always possible for a user with appropriate permissions to manually close a section or instance. Closure of a parent item will close all of its open children. However, closure of a child item will not affect its siblings or parent items.

Closed items can also be manually re-opened (again, by users with appropriate permissions). Opening a parent item this way will open all of its children. Opening a child item will open its parent, but not affect its siblings.

Therefore, it is possible for a parent item to be open, but with its children in a mixed state with regards to availability. But it is not possible for a parent to be closed without all of its children being closed.

Interaction between progress and availability statuses

Manually closing a section or instance that is not complete will change the progress status:

• If it is Not started or In progress it will be updated to Not submitted
• If it is Complete, it will remain as Complete

Manually re-opening an item has the following effect:

Since it is possible for a user with appropriate permissions to add additional participant instances to a subject instance, this may also change the availability status of the subject instance. A closed subject instance will be automatically re-opened by the creation of a new open child item, but the existing closed participant instances will not be affected. Thus, automated re-opening (via additional participant instance creation) has a different outcome to manual re-opening.

Given the above, while availability status can be directly manipulated, progress status is only indirectly affected by manual actions.

Aggregation of statuses

In the rare instance where a participant in another's subject instance has more than one relationship to the subject, statuses across those multiple participant instances are aggregated for display purposes only in the row view under Activities about others.

The Not submitted status is treated as Complete for the purposes of aggregation in determining a parent item's status, whereas the N/A (view only) status is ignored.

The level at which manual closure occurs may result in slightly different outcomes when it comes to items that are not yet complete. Closing at the subject instance level means that the instance as a whole will be marked Not submitted (as will all incomplete child items as they will also be closed). However, if instead closing all incomplete child items, only they will be marked as Not submitted – their parents' status will update to Complete (because aggregation treats Not submitted as Complete). If those parent items are subsequently closed, their status will not change (Complete remains Complete).

What this means is that if the intent is to achieve a Complete status for a parent item that has unfinished children, it is important to close the lowest level item first, and then work your way up.

Additional scenarios

Single-section activities

Section-level progress statuses are largely redundant in a single-section activity, because the participant instance mirrors the status of the section. It is not possible to manually alter the availability status of a section on such an activity, but only operate at the level of the participant instance (or subject instance).

Missing participants

Since subject instance completion is an aggregate of its participant instances, in the case where no user has been calculated to fill an automated relationship (e.g. the subject has no manager, appraiser, manager's manager), this will not impact subject instance progress, as no participant instance can be generated for those missing relationships.

Pending subject instance

Where an activity requires relationships to be manually populated (Peer, Mentor, Reviewer and External participant relationships), the subject instance will be in a Pending state until all manual relationships are filled. No participant instances (manual or automated) are generated until all manual relationships have been resolved, thus Pending is only a property of subject instances.

Changing automatic closure setting once activity is active

Disabling or enabling this setting does not retrospectively alter the availability status of existing sections or instances. Since completion is the trigger for closure, when toggling from disabled to enabled, only completed items that are subsequently modified (i.e. responses resubmitted) will be automatically closed. When toggling from enabled to disabled, all previously automatically closed items will remain closed, but any items that subsequently achieve completion will remain open.

Permissions 

By default, Staff Managers have the capabilities for manual closure / re-opening, and adding participants in the context of their team members, giving them control over all of their subject instances.