The Air Force has resumed rolling out its new performance review system after myriad technical difficulties forced the service to stop using the software last fall.
The app, a Salesforce product known as myEval, is supposed to be the centerpiece of a broader effort to overhaul how airmen are judged on their accomplishments, teamwork and leadership. By resuming incremental updates, the Air Force aims to deliver on that promise after more than a year of glitches and give airmen more peace of mind ahead of the next promotion cycle.
“An updated version of our myEval system was launched on March 13, is working well and has been successful in modernizing our evaluation process,” Air Force spokesperson Laurel Falls told Military Times in a May 5 email. “We’ll continue to refine and improve it over time to ensure it meets the need of the service.”
Salesforce has tweaked its code to create a more user-friendly layout, with fewer pop-up windows and fewer clicks at each step of the process, another Air Force official said Monday. MyEval can now pull in personal data from elsewhere in the Air Force human resources ecosystem, and it allows them to click to sign documents without downloading and reuploading PDFs.
All officers and chief master sergeants can now use myEval to fill out and submit their review paperwork, the Air Force official said. Senior master sergeants should be able to do the same by the time their annual reviews are due July 31.
The Air Force expects to expand the program to master sergeants by the end of July, followed by technical sergeants, staff sergeants and senior airmen later in the year. MyEval is also supposed to show how airmen stack up against a set of traits it wants the force to embody, from accountability to emotional intelligence.
The service hopes a gradual rollout will be smoother and more successful than the program’s first year.
MyEval debuted in February 2022 but struggled with basic tasks, like adding job performance paperwork to a service member’s official records. The Air Force had already shut down its predecessor, a program called vPC, to make way for the new software.
Promotion boards rely on those reviews to decide who should rise through the ranks, and airmen have worried that the program’s hiccups could jeopardize their chances of moving up.
Without another fallback option, the service decided to pause its use of myEval in November to limit the potential damage to airmen’s careers. The pause came more than a month after the Air Force had hoped to introduce a new and improved version of the app.
In the meantime, human resources staffers could still log officer and enlisted reviews by running PDFs through another platform known as the Case Management System, the Air Force said.
“The primary consideration is to ensure there is no negative impact to any of our airmen or [Space Force] guardians,” the Air Force Personnel Center said on Facebook last year. “This pause also allows … teams to focus on the future myEval so it provides the trust, reliability, transparency and simplicity we need moving forward.”
Rachel Cohen is the editor of Air Force Times. She joined the publication as its senior reporter in March 2021. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Frederick News-Post (Md.), Air and Space Forces Magazine, Inside Defense, Inside Health Policy and elsewhere.
