Gold winner: Prophet (USA)
Categorised under: Interface design, Intranets, intranet innovation awards
Prophet's in-house designed online performance evaluations system reduced the appraisal process timeframe from two months to one week. Screenshot courtesy of Prophet.
Post 5 of 10 in a series of blog posts giving more insight into this year’s Intranet Innovation Award winners.
Prophet is a US-based global consultancy with a customer base of Fortune 500 companies.
Prophet’s online performance evaluation and appraisal system is an automated, centralised, dashboard system that takes an often cumbersome, time-consuming process and streamlines and automates it, creating a super-fast, super-easy feedback system that’s made life dramatically easier for all involved, whether requesting and gathering feedback, or ensuring all applicable staff members are contributing to the process.
The first step in designing the process was to automate the actual feedback request process. Leveraging information about project teams already maintained on the intranet, feedback requests are now automatically sent to people worked with during the review period. It’s a lot of feedback requests, but it’s more inclusive and applicable.
The system is flexible in order to let coaches request additional feedback – for example, from people who worked with an individual, but not on an official project the intranet tracks. Coaches can send further automated ‘nudges’ to people to encourage compliance with feedback requests.
Overall, Prophet’s basic feedback workflow stayed the same. In brief:
- Coaches (aka managers/supervisors) request feedback about their coachees from appropriate colleagues.
- There’s a period of time for feedback to be gathered.
- Coaches to write reviews for their coachees (guided by the feedback).
- Finally, reviews are shared with coachees.
This is an excellent example of using the intranet to simplify and dramatically improve business processes, reducing the appraisal process time from two months to one week. It also adheres to the belief that the intranet should be a ‘place for doing things’ not just a ‘place for reading things’.
(For full details of this Award-winning entry, obtain a copy of the 198-page Intranet Innovations 2009 report.)
James Robertson is the Managing Director of 