End-user development plan help guide

What is a Development Plan?

A development plan is a document that helps an employee identify and organize what he or she wants to accomplish. With the aid of development planning software like this tool, development plans can be created more quickly, organized uniformly, shared and automatically tracked during execution.

How to Create Your Development Plan

Development plans consist of one or more "goals" in which you are seeking to improve skill, abilities, frequency of behavior or performance. Goals can be tied to your most recent multi-rater feedback review's competency and behavior scores if you choose. Within the development planning tool, goals can be identified in one or more of the following ways:

1. Automatically selected by the tool based on highest- and lowest-rated items from your review.
2. Manually identified by you.
3. Manually identified by your manager (must be configured by administrators).

To allow the tool to automatically select your goals:

1. Start with a blank development plan template.
2. In the middle of the development planning tool's main page, click the link that says, "Automatically complete the plan with top 5 and bottom 5 behavioral items from the 360-degree review." Your plan will instantly populate with the top and bottom items from your review. In the event that fewer than five development areas were identified in either the "key strengths" or "development need" categories, your scores fell outside of acceptable ranges (not high or low enough, respectively). In this case, you can enter additional goals manually.

To identify your own goals:

1. Click the "Set a New Goal" link at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the prompts in the pop-up window that appears. Click the Save and Close button.

Types of Goals

Goals are classified as follows:

1. Key Strengths: Areas associated with the highest scoring items on your most recent feedback review. These are automatically selected by the development planning tool when you request the system auto-populate your plan.
2. Development Needs: Areas associated with the highest scoring items on your most recent feedback review. These are automatically selected by the development planning tool when you request the system auto-populate your plan.
3. Personal Objectives: Any goals you manually create in the tool.
4. Objectives Set By Manager: Any goals identified by your manager.

Editing Goal Details

Once you have identified your goals, you can enter additional details about each to assist you in tracking progress. These areas can be edited by clicking the “Edit Goal” option underneath each item.

These details include:

• Objectives: A statement of what you plan to improve.
• Measurements: How progress against the objective will be measured.
• Actions: What activities will be performed in order to achieve the objective.
• Outcome: What was the result of the development process.
• Metrics: Numerical Ranking of each item (may or may not be configured on your account).
• Due date: When the development process is expected to be completed.
• Development Plan Observer: An individual selected to provide ongoing feedback on your progress in the development area.

Who is Involved in the Development Plan?

There are up to 3 individual involved in a development plan:

• The Employee (target). This person is who the development plan is about.
• The Manager (optional). Depending on administrative settings, the manager can either have read-only access to an employee's plan or can have the ability to create a plan on the employee's behalf and provide comments on his or her progress.
• The Observer (optional). On plan items created by the employee or auto-filled by the system, the employee can select an Observer that has the ability to comment on the employee's progress on the plan item. The Observer can be the employee's manager or anyone else the employee selects from their most recent 360-degree feedback review rater list.

Employees/Targets

• Have read/write access to all goal fields except manager/observer comments.
• Have ability to set observer for a goal that they create.
• Do not have the ability to set the observer for a goal created by the manager (the manager is by default the observer).
• Can select reminder options for any goal.
• Can set due dates for any goal.

Managers (with read-only access enabled)

• Can view a summary screen of the development plan.
• Can export development plans to Excel or PDF.

Managers (with read-write access enabled)

• Can create goals for their employees.
• Can view a summary screen of the development plan.
• Can export development plans to Excel or PDF.
• Can comment on the employee's progress on any goal the manager creates.
• Can select or deselect reminder options for any goal he or she creates.

Observers

• Are selected from the Employee's most recent 360 feedback rater list.
• Can view specifics of any goal he or she is assigned to observe.
• Can comment on the employee's progress on any goal assigned to observe.
• Each goal can have its own observer.

Additional Administrative Notes

• Item scores for strength/development area items are current as of the time the development plan was created and use EchoSpan's standard scoring model.
• Detailed scores, if available, are cached as of the last time a 360 feedback report was created.
• Detailed scores are not available when rating pooling is on.