The annual employee performance review cycle required coordinated input from four parties — the employee, their direct manager, a reviewing manager one level above, and a talent analyst responsible for final quality assurance — but the actual process for moving a review through those four levels had no shared infrastructure. Email was the notification system. Shared drives and paper forms were the document management system. Individual memory and inbox management were the status tracking system.
For employees, this meant submitting a review and then waiting with no visibility into where it stood. For HR leadership, it meant no reliable picture of review completion rates, where bottlenecks were forming, or whether completed documents were actually reaching employees.
The central architectural decision was to use a single SharePoint list as the system of record for all review data, with a numeric progression field serving as the routing key for the workflow. Every time a reviewer saves their assessment, the app passes the current state to the flow, and the flow determines what happens next — whether to notify the reviewing manager, the talent analyst, or to initiate document generation. This approach eliminated the need for multiple lists, multiple triggers, or complex polling logic.
Role separation was enforced at the application layer. Employees interact only with the review form for their own submission. Managers access a dashboard filtered to their direct and indirect reports, with the organizational hierarchy resolved at app startup using the Office 365 Users connector. No manual role assignment is required.
The Performance Review Form is a multi-step canvas app guiding employees through a structured self-assessment covering 19 competency areas and five Key Performance Objective (KPO) sections. Managers submitting a proxy review on behalf of a subordinate follow the same form, with the review record automatically wired to the manager's organizational chain.
Three dedicated Power Automate flows orchestrate the complete review lifecycle. The Manager Review Dashboard gives Direct Managers and Reviewing Managers a searchable, filterable gallery of assigned reviews. When the talent analyst marks a review complete, the document generation pipeline retrieves the full review record, populates an organization-standard Word template with all data fields, converts the document to PDF using Word Online, and delivers the completed document to the employee and their direct manager by email.
This engagement pattern applies to any government agency, county department, school district, or large organization where multi-level review or approval processes are currently managed through email, shared drives, or paper forms. The core architecture is directly repeatable across performance management, position classification requests, corrective action workflows, promotion reviews, or any multi-role process that requires sequential input from different organizational levels and produces a formal document record at completion. The pattern scales without structural change: adding a review level means adding a case to the routing logic and a notification email, not rebuilding the workflow.
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