As of October 9, 2020, SAP has released their documentation for the H2 2020 release.  You can view the full set of documentation in the What’s New Viewer here.  As a reminder, preview release will be October 16 and production will be released November 20^th.  For full details on the release cycle, check out the SAP SuccessFactors official product updates blog here.  For tips on how to manage a release, check out or blog here.  For your convenience, we’ve summarized the highlights of what’s new for 2020 within Succession and Development below!

Writing Assistant and Coaching Advisor for Job Profile Builder

The biggest news for these modules we’ve seen is that the Job Profile builder now supports the Writing Assistant and Coaching Advisor (see below).  This was a big gap that is finally being closed.  We had some customers who wanted to use both the Job profile builder and the Writing Assistant and Coaching Advisor.  This required creating all of the content for the Coaching Advisor and Writing Assistant in the legacy competency library config screens and then switching on the Job Profile builder and hoping everything got converted OK.  If there was a mistake somewhere or something you wanted to add to the Coaching Advisor or Writing assistant…well then there wasn’t a way to fix it without turning off the Job Profile builder.  Now this gap is closed and a profile job profile builder compatible maintenance screen for the Writing Assistant and Coaching Advisor exists.  Woohoo!

Talent Search

Another significant enhancement we’ve seen is to the talent search.  Now at the top of the screen there’s a checkbox to toggle between AND/OR logic when searching for background information (see below).  We are wondering how this compliments / replaces the “Make All Criteria Optional” button that already existed under the settings menu.  You can also add up to 6 criteria within each background element.  There’s also a new competency picker in the talent search.  The export feature was also enhanced to allow you to reorder and choose which fields can be exported.  More fields can also be exported now under Advanced Information and Ratings & Competencies.

Calibration

Calibration sessions got a neat enhancement where you can now view comments from other calibration sessions so long as they use the same template (see below)!  We can see this becoming very useful to organizations that manage multiple sessions across large organizations.  This was also enhanced in the Odata API where a new object, “CaibrationSubjectComment”, is available so that these comments are exposed for interfacing.

In addition, you can also use autocomplete when searching for people in calibration.  Also, if you are attempting to purge a user who happens to be the only facilitator for a session you can now replace the user with an active user and then continue with the purge.

Career Worksheets and Career Explorer

Within Career Worksheets and the Career explorer we’ve seen some nice usability improvements.  For example, the ability to remove recommended roles in the career explorer.  Users can now remove a recommendation if they no longer wish to see it.  This is a nice feature that can help encourage employees to keep looking for other roles instead of just constantly throwing something irrelevant at them.  Aside from this, the career worksheet also got a security enhancement where the worksheet is only viewable if the employee is in the user’s target population.  The progress bar also swapped colors as shown below.  The bars will also show up now for not applicable / too new to rate competencies (they were hidden before).

Before:

After:

But that’s not all!

Development templates and Continuous Performance Management also got another integration point.  Now when a user

Matrix views (9-box) also got visual /usability updates.  For example, you can now remove the “Too New to Rate” option.  You can also view the people cards for employees even when you are zoomed out of their box.  You can also select reporting levels in the Matrix Grid Report.

You can now also hide contingent workers in the Succession Org Chart.  The “Add Successor” icon also appears now even when there is no successor exists.

Talent pool nominations can also now be approved or rejected.  Nomination history for talent pools is also available via the Odata API and People Analytics Stories.

All in all, there’s over 25 items being changed/enhanced in this release and we didn’t cover every detail here.  For more information, check out the What’s New Viewer here.

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