If the HR Professional selects the parallel objective-setting process in the Performance Management Plan (PMP), workers start the objective-setting process. By contrast, in the cascading process, managers start the objective-setting process.
When the application generates personal scorecards, they contain objectives automatically allocated to workers or copied from their previous appraisals or personal scorecards. In the parallel process, workers, prompted by the PMP task Set Objectives, update their personal scorecards before passing control of the scorecards to their managers. The managers can then review their workers' personal scorecards before making any additional changes.
Although the flow of control between managers and workers varies with the process (cascading or parallel), the tasks that managers and workers can perform are the same. For example, even when using the parallel objective-setting process, managers can still cascade objectives to workers. Similarly, when using the cascading process, managers do not have to cascade objectives to their workers.
The following figure summarizes the flow of control between managers and workers in a parallel objective-setting process. The process starts with the worker task Set Objectives.
For information about the tasks shown in this figure, see Manager Performance-Management Tasks and Worker Performance-Management Tasks
For information about the cascading process, see Cascading Objectives