SAP Knowledge Base Article - Public

2071525 - FAQs and General GM Information - Goal Management

Symptom

On this article you'll find some Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about Goal Plans (Goal Management).

Environment

SAP SuccessFactors Goal Management

Resolution

How are goals handled when someone changes jobs or leaves the organization?

All goal details, including the alignment information are retained within the system for any user changes. For people who have left the company, the goals of the departed user can be transferred, by the application administrator, to new owners of the goals (i.e. goals can be distributed to different people).

For users who changed jobs, such as via a promotion, the original goals can be edited to reflect new requirements of the position. Other goals can be transferred to appropriate new goal owners.

Who can see my goals or details of my goals?

Permissions to see other people's goal can be configured within the system (on a per company basis). For example, rules can be set where everyone can see all the details of everyone's "public"/"shared" goals, or only the direct manager, or managers above the organizational hierarchy can see goals of direct and indirect reports.

Certain goal attributes can also be configured to be hidden for shared viewing. For example, a sales representative can shared the goal "Meet quarterly and annual sales quota" with the organization, whereas the actual "sales to date" is an attribute that is only viewable by the goal owner and manager.

Users can also mark goals as "private" and not share them with the organization. An example is a goal of "Reduce headcount by 5%." For obvious reasons, the manager does not want to share the goal with direct reports. The goal can be marked "private" and the viewing permission can be configured so that only the goal owner and manager can see the goal and associated details.

Do you support matrix/project-based goal alignment?

Yes, goals can be cascaded from manager to direct reports, or from project managers to project members. Cascading permissions can also be configured, examples include anyone can cascade a goal to anyone, or goals can only be cascaded only from users higher in the organizational hierarchy.

How do you handle goal changes or mid-year adjustments?

Goals remain "fluid" in the system and can be updated at any time. The most up-to-date version of any shared goals will always be displayed.

Any updates to the higher aligned goal will trigger an alert, i.e. a visual indicator within the application, for the owner of the "child goal". For example, if a sales manager updated his/her sales quota from $10 million to $15 million, (and if all the sales manager's direct reports have goals that are aligned to the manager's goal,) all the direct reports will get an alert notifying them that the higher goal has been updated and they should update their goals accordingly, which in turn may trigger another level of alerts downwards. Similarly, if a manager edits a direct report's goal, an alert is also be generated for the direct report.

Can we rename goals, tasks, etc. to something else?

Yes, goal attributes can be configured to fit any organization-specific terminology. About half of our customers use the word objective as opposed to goals. Words such as initiatives, or projects, have been used in place of tasks, other examples include, metrics vs. measures.

Can we align two existing goals?

Yes, we support the free-form alignment of 2 existing goals. You can navigate to the user whose goal you would like to align and then align it to an existing goal of yours.

What are the character limitations of goal attributes?

There is a 2048 character limit for task name and milestone name. The status field is limited to 128 characters. All other fields, such as name, description, metric, etc. have no limits since they are stored as an object in the database (XML blob). Well, technically, the limit is about 2GB.

How does the TGM audit history work?

An audit history entry is generated every time a different person updates a goal (relative to the last person who edited it), such as in a performance review process where the employee edits a goal, then the manager, then the manager's manager.

For example:

  1. Manager creates goal with a cascade
  2. Employee edits goal à Audit record created of previous state
  3. Employee edits goal
  4. Employee edits goal
  5. Manager edits goal à Audit record created of previous state
  6. Manager edits goal
  7. 2nd level manager edits goal à Audit record created of previous state
  8. and so on.

We designed it such that not all incremental edits by the same person would be captured since that would create a potentially and unnecessarily long audit trail listing, which would have a negative effect on the UI and display performance (not to mention significant storage in the

backend). The way that audit history is generated is also consistent with how we store form revision history, in that a version is saved only when a document is sent to the next person.

How do you localize a TGM goal plan?

Goal plan templates can be localized to support other languages. The lang attribute can be used with the following elements to localize a TGM goal plan:

  • obj-plan-name
  • text
  • category-name
  • field-label
  • field-description
  • table-row-label
  • enum-value
  • enum-label
  • column-label
  • column-description
  • default-value

Keywords

faq, gm, goal management, goals, frequented, asked, questions, TGM, , KBA , csg_q , LOD-SF-GM-ADM , Admin Tools, Settings, Permissions , How To

Product

SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals all versions