Changes to personnel

When using Totara Perform you may need to deal with a personnel change, such as a change in manager or a new hire among other changes.

Performance activities are designed to protect sensitive information by displaying it only to the appropriate users. However, when users change roles or relationships with other users, it’s possible that information may be shared with new users through a performance activity. For example, a manager might be able to see new performance activity responses of their former team members after they change teams. Always verify that your processes are set up to protect Totara users' data. This includes how long you keep user data, what happens when users or job assignments change, whether the information included is potentially sensitive, and other data privacy considerations.

Regardless of when a user is assigned to an activity, any automatically selected participants will be based on the relationships at the time a subject instance is generated. After that point, updates to those relationships are ignored, so for example if your manager changes, a new participant instance is not generated automatically for your new manager. In addition, the new manager does not gain ownership of the old manager's participant instance – it is always tied to that original user, even if they no longer fulfil the relationship.

One way to include users who populate those relationships after the fact is to manually add them as participants so that they get their own participant instance. You can see more about manually adding participants on the Manually managing performance activity availability page.

In the case of repeating activities, the next time a subject instance is generated it will reflect those updated users (because that is what is true at the time of instance generation).

When a user’s relationship changes after a participant instance has been generated (e.g. if a participant instance is generated for your manager but then your manager changes) nothing happens to the status of that instance (the user can choose to still complete it), unless someone with appropriate permissions manually closes it.

For manually populated relationships, they have to be selected every time a subject instance is generated, even if it is a repeating activity. The users chosen to populate a manual relationship are relevant for that single subject instance only.

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