SharePoint became HidePoint when we helped a large regional company to move its staff annual performance appraisals onto SharePoint.
The confidentiality of staff appraisals was (of course) a very important aspect of this project, and we used SharePoint’s ability to restrict visibility of records to selected individuals, depending on their place within the organisation.
The appraisals are simple in themselves, and assess how well staff fulfil their current role and also their desire for progression. Also, in their assessor’s opinion, their suitability for progression is estimated, according to varying timelines. SharePoint’s form-building capability was easily able to cope with that, and aggregated scores on individual measures into an objective scoring mechanism.
In addition to the inputs by staff and assessors, the results can be commented on or moderated by a hierarchy of “business partners”, team leaders and senior managers. Clearly, such information is highly sensitive and has to be protected against being accessed by the wrong pairs of eyes. The information is “trimmed” to be visible by different individuals, according to their place in the hierarchy. In other words, a team manager can see his or her team’s appraisals, and a senior manager can see appraisals across several teams.
As the management hierarchy was not reliably aligned to the organisation’s Active Directory, we built a custom hierarchy which could be trimmed to each individual’s reporting lines, based on data extracted from the company’s HR system.
Although the HR system had its own appraisal module, the licensing cost was considered prohibitive by our customer.
Hence, SharePoint won again as a simple and practical value-for-money solution, meeting the needs of several thousand staff.