Introducing Review365

Posted originally on the Hable blog

Introducing Review365

Hable is about to enter our 4th year. The first 3 years have been a tremendous journey, working with almost 100 customers – from the smallest school to the Houses of Parliament – and now its time for us to take the next step.

Until now we have been a Services business, helping organisations with 2 main things:

1. Moving to the cloud with Office365
2. The “people side” of technology projects

In January 2018, Hable will launch our first product – which is called Review365.

Because most of our customers use Office365, it will come as no surprise that our first product is an Office 365 app. It is an app for managing the appraisal or annual review process, online – allowing our customers to improve staff performance and get valuable data from the appraisal process. This is the story of how Review365 came to be:

One of our school customers ( JESS Dubai) approached Hable about turning their staff appraisal grids into an online system.  Mark Steed from JESS has been developing these grids over a number of years – both at JESS, and previously when he was the Principal at Berkhamsted School in the UK. Because we’re good at SharePoint Online, we first tried to build it as a SharePoint app – which worked functionally but was a bit clunky and didn’t look great! We’re never afraid to “fail fast” and “fail better” – so we rapidly gave up trying to build it in SharePoint and decided to build it as an Office365 app instead. So, JESS are the first Hable customer to have Review365 installed and we owe Mark a lot – not only for inspiring us to build it, but also for convincing us that they were not the only organisation who would need an app like this. Because the JESS appraisal grids contain all the competencies for teachers, school leaders and school support staff – it will naturally work well for schools. However, we will also work with customers in other sectors to provide grids for their industries – or customers can simply upload their own competency framework into our tool.

The app will launch from the Office365 “waffle” (aka the App Launcher) and be deployed into your existing Office365 tenant. The data will all be stored in Azure. Once installed, you can begin to improve staff performance & collect valuable data by managing your Appraisal process with Review365. Here’s how it works:

• You use your Office365 email address to sign in
• Staff members self-assess against a set of competencies
• Appraiser rates the Appraisee against the same set of competencies
• In your Appraisal or annual review meeting, the gradings are discussed & moderated
• The leadership team can generate reports & analyse data from across the organisation

We are officially launching Review365 at BETT 2018 and have a launch party on the evening of Thursday January 25th. If you are at BETT and would like to join us for a drink to celebrate then please email [email protected] and ask nicely to get your name on the guestlist.

The website will be live in a few weeks’ time, right here: www.review365.info – and we’ll have a video demo on there for you to watch. If you would like to book an online demo before that, or ask any other questions – then please get in touch.