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.

Do you need help managing your SuccessFactors Release cycles? Download our support services brochure or email info@worklogix.com to see how we can help!

What’s New in Succession?

With the SAP SuccessFactors First Half 2020 release there are six updates in Succession. There are four new features and two enhancements. Let’s start with Talent Pools.

Talent Pools

There are two new features and some minor enhancements for Talent Pools.

The two new features are:

View Nomination History for Talent Pools
View Talent Pool Nominations in People Profile and Talent Cards without Talent Pool Object Level Permission

The Talent Pool enhancements involve filter fields and the Nomination Table.

Now let’s look closer at each starting with what’s new for Talent Pools.

View Nomination History for Talent Pools

This new universal feature permits those with Talent Pool permission to see nomination changes for nominees within a Talent Pool.

In prior releases, there was no nomination history available to view within a talent pool. Now users with Talent Pool role-based permissions with assigned target populations may see the nomination history for employees in a talent pool.

Within a talent pool, there is new icon used to view nomination history for each nominee. The example shown below identifies the icon which displays on the top right side of the talent pool table.

View Nomination History Icon

Talent pool nominees that have nomination change history for this pool will display in the “Nominees” section that displays on the left side of the page. Click on any nominee name from this column and their nomination change history for this talent pool will display.

An example is displayed below.

Talent Pool Nominees with Nomination Changes

The name of the user that made the change will display along with the change date. The readiness, status, nomination source and notes for each change are displayed as well.

Approved and Removed nominees will display their nomination history. You must click the checkbox for “Show Removed” in the nominees section to see any employees removed from the talent pool. Both Approved and Removed nominees will display as seen below. The default view is approved nominees.

Approved and Removed Nominees with Nomination Change History

To see the nominee’s talent pool history for another date range, click the “Date Range” calendar icon that is available on this screen. An example is shown below.

Modify Date Range for Nomination History

The default date range is one year from the current date. The date range may be modified and then the nomination history will display for the new date range

We will now look at the other new feature for Talent Pools.

View Talent Pool Nominations in People Profile and Talent Cards without Talent Pool Object Level Permission

It is now possible to enable users without Talent Pool object level permission to view Talent Pool nominations of employees in People Profile and Talent Card.

This new feature may be used to enable managers to see this information for their direct reports in People Profile and Talent Card.

This is a provisioning opt-in. The setting to enable is “View Talent Pool nominations in People Profile and Talent Card without having the Talent Pool object level permission“.

When enabled, users without Talent Pool object level permission may view Talent Pool nominations for employees within:

Nomination Block in People Profile
Nominations section of Talent Card

In addition to these two new features, there is also an enhancement for Talent Pools that we will look at next.

Talent Pool Enhancements

There are a few enhancements to talent pools. Let’s open a talent pool to see what’s changed.

Talent Pool Nomination Table View

First, there are more lines available in a talent pool nomination table view as seen below. This update also includes making the line width consistent with tables in other modules.

Updated Nomination Table for a Talent Pool

Notes Column Placement

There is an additional display field option as well. Users may modify the position of the Notes column. Let’s see how it’s done.

Within the talent pool, click on the “Define Column Properties” icon as noted below.

A pop up displays the available fields that may be included in the talent pool view. When the cursor is place on “Notes“, the upward and downward arrows may be used to change placement of this field.

Clicking “OK” and the nominations in the Talent Pool will now reflect the changed column order as seen in the figure below.

Nomination Table with Updated Notes Column Placement

The final enhancement to Talent Pools involves selected filters.

Talent Pool Filters

First, the selected filters can now be automatically cleared after all nominees are deleted from a Talent Pool. Looking at the example below, the filters were defined by clicking “Adapt Filters“.

Here is where the filters are defined. The fields to use as filters are selected and will appear on the filter bar within a talent pool.

In the example shown below, there is a filter to display nominees with a readiness of 1 to 2 years.

After the final nominee is deleted from the talent pool, the readiness filter is cleared as seen below.

We have now seen all of the updates for Talent Pools. Let’s see what else is new in Succession.

Exclude Nominees from Seeing Themselves within a Succession Plan

This is an admin opt-in setting that when enabled, prevents users nominated as successors to see themselves in a succession plan. This will also prevent them from nominating themselves. This means that users with permission to do Succession Planning for certain positions won’t see themselves within the succession plans of those positions.

Let’s see how to enable this feature. Go to “Nominations Set Up”. Scroll to the very bottom of the screen and enable “Exclude nominees from seeing themselves within a succession plan”. The “Nomination Set Up” page is shown below.

This exclusion prevents nominees from nominating themselves. Additionally, the nominees would not see themselves in Succession Org Chart, Position Tiles, Lineage Chart, Talent card, People Profile, Presentation and Nomination History from position card. A Talent Search would not display them or a list that they are a part of.

There is one additional feature that we will now explore.

New OData API Function Imports for Succession

There are two new OData API Function Imports for Succession:

approveSuccessors
rejectSuccessors

These function imports may be used to approve or reject nominees that are in a pending status.

In prior releases, third-party applications could only read the Succession nominations in Pending Approval status.

The two new function imports allows third-party applications to write the approval steps of the nomination workflow.

The role-based permissions needed for both function imports is: Succession Planners>Succession Approval Permission.

Approve Nominees in Pending Status

Pending status for approvals are:

Change Pending
Pending
Approval Pending

Parameters for approval and rejection are nomineeIds (mandatory) and comment (optional).

NomineeIds use semicolon between multiple ids.

example: https://<API-Server>odata/v2/approveSuccessors?nomineeIds=’101;102;103’&comment=’testapproval’

Rejecting Nominees in Pending Status

Pending status for rejecting successors are:

Change Pending
Pending
Deletion Pending

example: https:///odata/v2/rejectSuccessors?nomineeIds=’100;101;102’&comment=’test’

Now we have seen what’s new in Succession, let’s see the final enhancement.

Picklist Label Enhancements for Matrix Grid Report and Talent Pools Overview Page

In previous releases, picklists used for filter fields in the Matrix Grid Reports and Talent Pool Nominations overview page showed option IDs rather than labels.

Matrix grid reports support custom filters and these filters may be associated with a picklist. If this is the case, the picklist labels will be displayed in the customizable fields. Picklists that are used for filter fields of the Matrix Grid Reports and Talent Pools nominations overview page will now show labels instead of option IDs. A custom picklist with values for a talent pool filter is shown below.

These fields also remember the picklist labels that were chosen the last time.

Wrap Up

We have now seen the new features and functionality for the Succession module. Check out my blogs on Highlight of 1H 2020 Release Updates for Calibration and Career Development too.

Do you need help supporting or implementing your SAP SuccessFactors Succession module? Contact us at: info@worklogix.com or download our support services brochure.

Tag: Succession

What’s New for Succession and Development in H2 2020