Jira behind the scenes

The system had a unique architecture, consisting of two Jira projects, a Jira Service Desk project, and a Jira Core project. The primary reason for this was cost efficiency, which was achieved by minimizing the licensing of the Service Desk project and maximizing the use of the integrated tools offered by Jira.

In the Service Desk project, the evaluators submitted their evaluations through a customer portal, and the HR professionals saw all the evaluations in this system and recorded the results. In the simpler core project, the managers carried out their own assessments, and the final consensus, i.e., the joint evaluation, was also documented in this project.

The workflow of the two projects was very similar. Team members typically worked in the management core project, from where the data was synchronized to the Service Desk project. No manual tasks were moved during synchronization: thanks to Jira automation, changes to the core project were automatically tracked within the Service Desk project.

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What exactly does the process look like?

In the first phase, employees submitted a self-assessment form through the Customer Portal running in the Service Desk project. This caused a Clone and Link issue Scriptrunner plugin to create a linked issue within the Core project and link them together.

The self-assessment portal itself was clean and transparent, enabling team members to submit their assessments by sectoral department and manager, as well as using this interface to review their previous results and approve their assessments.

When the submitter submitted a review, the selected manager received an email notification. This functionality was implemented with the META-INF Email This Issue add-on. The email was fully customized and included a link to the assessments that the manager needed to carry out on the team member. 

The resulting link took the user to the Jira Core project, where they could choose between two options: a ‘considered’ or a ‘quick’ assessment. The two did not differ in content, but while the ‘quick’ assessment couldn’t be saved, the ‘deliberate’ one could, which meant it could be completed with interruptions. 

The management evaluation used the same elements as the subordinate evaluation, but in a different project. When completed, the process moved to the next phase; the manager's assessment was synchronized with the Service Desk project to store all the relevant information in one place, facilitating later reporting. 

The manager could then access a link to the issue created by their subordinate, where they could freely view their subordinate's self-assessment and compare it.

Once these processes were complete, the self-assessing employee received an email notification inviting them to organize a joint face-to-face assessment.

After the discussion, the mutually agreed assessment was finally uploaded to a third but identical-looking interface. If this was not the case, for example, because of many different opinions, HR could also intervene. By agreement or with external help, the issue would, in any case, be moved to ‘Evaluated’ status, which is the end of the workflow in the Jira Core project. The consensus value was then copied to the Service Desk project and a comment was generated in the Customer Portal.

Once the consensus had been reached, the manager could see their own assessment and joint assessments in the Core project. This data would remain freely available to them in the future.

The self-assessor would also receive email notification of the consensus outcome, including the results. They also received a link to the Customer Portal, where they would find all the details of their review as a comment. Embedding the comment on the portal was necessary to allow Jira users with only ‘customer’ access to all the data related to their evaluation in one place.

Last but not least, it also provided the option to accept the evaluation immediately. If the results discussed in the consensus were incorrectly recorded, the user also had the possibility to reject the consensus. In this case, HR would be notified. If the acceptance were not performed manually due to inattention, it would be done automatically after 24 hours. This was carried out using a free automation add-on.

If the assessment were given a closed status, a unique field would record whether it had been accepted as positive or negative, and an issue security would be set for the managers concerned. 

Great results, continuous improvements

Following the launch of the new system, thanks to, among other things, good communication and professional change management, almost 100% of employees completed the self-assessment in the first 2-3 weeks, and most of the management assessments were completed. These outstanding results provided excellent feedback that the high expectations had been met and that a transparent, intuitive and easy-to-use system had been created, which team members are happy to use.

The excellent results inspired further improvements. Shortly after its introduction, Antenna Hungária's performance assessment system was extended to include the option to set long-term targets. This allowed the staff to record their career goals at the beginning of the year and their preferred development direction and build their mid-year work on this. It has also made it easier for managers to record, modify, and retrieve the goals they have set together.

What’s next?

Following the implementation of the new system, Antenna Hungária's HR team now has a great evaluation system, which the figures show has been well received and used by team members. 

However, performance assessment is only a tiny part of HR's overall scope of work, which is why after implementation – encouraged by the good results – the company began thinking about implementing other valuable functions such as tax returns, payroll, and cafeteria into Jira to make everyday work easier for themselves and their colleagues.

Jira Service Management
Jira Service Management is Atlassian’s service management solution for all teams. It is designed to help you unlock high-velocity teams by empowering every team to deliver great service fast, bringing visibility to work, and accelerating the flow of work between development, IT, and business teams.

Jira Core
Jira Core is a business project management software aiming at the simplest possible traceability of workflows and tasks.

META-INF Email This Issue for Jira

Make your customers' lives easier through email-based communication. Improves the productivity of your help desk team by enabling them to receive and respond to emails without leaving Jira.

Source: Service management in an HR – not IT – environment - META-INF Atlassian Day