.NET-Based Software for Fast and Transparent Employee Performance Assessment

Customer

The Customer is a US telecom provider offering communication and voice termination services.

Challenge

The Customer used to review their employees’ performance by offering them to fill in several assessment questionnaires. To do that, they had to switch among numerous applications, which was rather unhandy and time-consuming. The Customer needed a one-stop solution to optimize this process.

They commissioned ScienceSoft to develop an all-in-one performance appraisal system integrating 3 modules:

• The Goals form to set employees’ performance goals and track their fulfillment.
• Questionnaires for employees to assess each other’s performance.
• Performance Improvement Plan for managers to advise their employees on how to improve their working progress.

The Customer wanted these modules to be easily accessible for the user’s convenience.

Solution

ScienceSoft’s project team consisted of a Team Lead and a Senior .NET developer. Later on, it was augmented with one more developer and a QA specialist. The system development process was split into several iterations of 2 weeks’ length. During each iteration, our developers added new features, after which the QA specialist conducted regression testing to make sure the changes hadn’t violated the solution’s functionality. Then, our team provided the Customer with a demo version of the system to review the project results.

The Goals form

Our team implemented the Goals form that an employee and his or her manager fill in each quarter. The manager indicates both professional and personal goals for this employee to achieve. He or she regularly reviews quarter goals achievement and assesses it using a 4-point scale: from 1 (unsuccessful) to 4 (surpassed) and adding comments if necessary.

Questionnaires

Our experts implemented questionnaires for the Customer’s employees to fill in annually. With these questionnaires, employees assess their own and each other’s performance (including managers).

The questionnaires contain sections devoted to communication and collaboration skills of an employee, their willingness to contribute ideas and learn new skills and quality of their work. To assess a peer (or oneself), an employee chooses from 6 options starting from 1 – unsatisfactory to 6 – exceptional. The last section describes an employee’s overall performance and requires a yes/no answer to the questions contained in it and allows adding some comments. The questionnaire for assessing managers’ performance also contains the leadership section, where subordinates can anonymously assess their manager’s leadership skills.

Performance Improvement Plan

ScienceSoft’s team added the Organizational chart bar to the system menu. This chart shows the company’s organizational structure with a separate window for each employee. When an employee clicks this window, the Performance Improvement Plan tab appears. A manager can add a custom text there to advise this employee on how to increase his or her working progress. Employees’ windows are marked with signs of different colors to denote each employee’s performance - high, medium or low. Managers can fill in and modify the Performance Improvement Plan at any time.

Other elements in the system

We also added the To-do-list bar to the system’s menu to show the reports an employee should complete by the due date. The list of reports is displayed on a single page. On the due date, an employee gets an email notification about the necessity to fill in a report. The completed reports can be found in the History menu bar.

Results

The Customer got an all-in-one system that made their employee performance review process organized and transparent. The Customer’s employees got greater ease in completing a wide range of assessment and goal-setting tasks, as well as the ability to add Performance Improvement Plans.

Technologies and Tools

JQuery, Bootstrap, FlatUI, D3.js, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework 6, Oracle