New Development Plan Section in Performance Reviews
This release introduces a modern, unified development planning experience directly within the performance review workflow. Employees and managers can now create and edit development plans—adding objectives, skills, learning items, and tasks—without leaving the review task. The redesigned section aligns visually and functionally with the standalone Development Plan module and syncs in real time once reviews complete.
What's New
- New development plan section configurable within performance review templates
- Create development plans directly inside the review task without leaving the workflow
- Modern full-page create and edit experience with objectives, skills, learning, and tasks
- Explore and apply development plan templates during plan creation
- Real-time sync with the Development Plan module after review completion
- Permission-aware experience honoring development plan and review step edit rights
Details
Description
The new Development Plan section delivers a modern and unified development planning experience directly within the performance review workflow. Employees and managers can create development plans as they add objectives, skills, learning items, and tasks, all without leaving the review task. This reduces friction and improves usability across the review process.
The redesigned experience aligns visually and functionally with the standalone Development Plan tool, creating greater consistency across the platform. Created plans display within the review task using a card-based layout showing objectives, skills, learning activities, tasks, status, and metadata, with a contextual three-dot menu for editing or removing a plan. Plans sync in real time with the Development Plan module once the review is completed.
Business Need
Organizations want managers and employees to capture actionable development plans during performance reviews. While a development plan section already existed within the review task, customers found the experience outdated, limited, and inconsistent with the standalone Development Plan module. Key capabilities such as modern workflows, templates, richer learning experiences, and intuitive editing were missing.
By bringing a modern, streamlined planning experience directly into the review task, this enhancement drives stronger development planning adoption, improves employee engagement, and creates better alignment between performance discussions and long-term employee growth. It also lays the groundwork for future enhancements such as primary development plan integration and expanded planning scenarios.
Key Features
- A new development plan section can be configured within performance review templates through the create form section workflow, with admin-defined section title and instructional text.
- Employees and managers can create development plans directly inside the review task through a full-page workflow that opens within the same tab.
- A modern full-page create and edit experience supports plan overview attributes including title, description, objectives, skills, learning items, and development tasks, with a fixed bottom action bar for save and discard actions.
- Users can explore and apply development plan templates during plan creation, with template data automatically pre-populating content that remains fully editable before saving.
- Development plans sync in real time with the Development Plan module, becoming available there after the review task is completed and the required approvals are obtained.
- The experience is permission-aware, allowing creation and editing only for users with the appropriate development plan permissions and edit rights on the review step; others receive view-only access.
Deployment & Considerations
The new development plan section becomes available with the start of UAT on stage environments and on production environments with the production release. It is available by default for customers using the redesigned Development Plan module UI. Customers on the legacy Development Plan experience must first enable the new Development Plan module UI via the performance feature self-activation page before they can configure or use the section.
This experience is supported only for Task Central-based reviews combined with the redesigned Development Plan module; customers using legacy reviews or the legacy Development Plan UI are not eligible. No new permissions were introduced. To configure the section, enable the new Development Plan module UI, then open the form sections admin page under Performance Review, go to Create Review Section, and select the Development Plan (New) option under the type dropdown. The legacy section option remains available. The July 2026 release supports only the creation of new development plans within the review task; viewing, editing, and syncing primary development plans is planned for the November 2026 release. Multiple development plans within a single review task are not supported in this release, and plans created within review tasks follow existing approver workflows and publishing rules.