Playbook Protocol
A practical cadence for setup, collection, and close. Designed for HR stakeholders and team leaders running Interval 360 assessments internally, without burning out raters or the participant.
High-level timeline overview.
Overview
Fourteen days is the right window for most 360 assessments. Short enough to maintain momentum and rater goodwill. Long enough to accommodate normal scheduling friction without daily follow-up.
This playbook walks through a three-phase cadence: configure the project and work through the rater nomination and approval process before launch, give raters a clean collection window, and let the project close on schedule with reports ready the next day. Each phase includes the most common failure point and how to avoid it. For more details, see the step-by-step process.
Interval 360 generates reports automatically when the project end date arrives, so your primary job after setup is context-setting and light coordination. The platform handles the rest.
14-Day Cadence at a Glance
The cadence
Log into the Interval 360 admin dashboard and create the project. Set the project end date to Day 14 and configure the automated reminder to send at seven days.
Before anything else happens, have a direct conversation with the participant. Cover why this assessment is happening, who will see which report (the participant receives the Development Report; their manager or HR receives the Assessment Report), and what they will be asked to do next: nominate their manager, peers, and direct reports. A participant who understands the process before rater outreach begins is less likely to informally coach their nominees or create confusion about what the assessment is for.
The participant submits their nominations through Interval 360. This includes their manager — who will contribute the Results Score based on the participant's OKR performance — as well as peers and direct reports. They can nominate up to 10 peers and up to 10 direct reports. More nominations are better. A larger pool means more data points, richer context, and built-in resilience if some raters do not complete the process. An assessment where eight of ten nominated peers provide feedback is far more useful than one where only three peers provide feedback.
The participant does not control who actually receives an invitation. That decision sits with you in the next step. Let participants know this so they nominate honestly, not strategically.
In the admin dashboard, review the participant's nominations. You have two options beyond simply approving the list as submitted: you can remove a nominee you do not believe will provide objective or qualified feedback, and you can add raters who were not nominated by the participant but whose perspective you want included.
Use this step carefully. Removing a nominee without explanation can damage trust with the participant. Adding raters they did not nominate can shift the dynamics of the feedback in ways the participant did not anticipate. Both moves are legitimate, but both are worth a brief conversation with the participant if they are significant departures from the original list.
Once you approve the list, Interval 360 sends rater invitations automatically. Each rater receives a secure, individual link. The experience is a short conversational exchange, typically around five minutes, and raters do not need an account.
Before or alongside the invitations, send raters a brief note — from you or from the participant's manager — explaining what this assessment is, why it is happening, and what the participant will do with the results. Rater invitations do not include this background on their own. Raters who arrive with context complete more thoughtfully than those who receive a cold invitation with no framing.
Resist the urge to intervene in the first few days. Most raters complete within 48 hours of receiving their invitation, particularly when they already have context about what the assessment is and why it is happening. That context should have been set before invitations went out — a brief note from the participant's manager or from you, explaining what Interval 360 is and why their perspective matters, meaningfully improves both completion rates and response quality.
Monitor the admin dashboard and check whether early completions are distributed across rater types, not just clustered among the most accessible people. You do not need to do anything yet.
If you configured the project with a seven-day reminder, Interval 360 sends it automatically to any raters who have not yet completed. You do not need to do anything. Monitor completion status in the admin dashboard and note which rater categories are still short.
The admin dashboard shows you exactly which raters have not yet completed. If you are approaching the end of the collection window and a particular rater category is close to the minimum threshold, a direct message to those individuals is appropriate.
Keep it light. Something like: "We're closing this assessment on [date] and your perspective would be valuable. It takes about five minutes when you have a moment." Then let it go. If someone does not respond after a direct note, that is their answer.
In the last two days before close, verify your completion counts by rater category in the admin dashboard. You need at least one manager response, three peer responses, and three direct report responses for the report to generate. If you are short in any category, this is your last window to reach out directly or add a replacement rater to the project.
Do not extend the project end date to accommodate stragglers unless there is a compelling reason. Extending deadlines trains raters and participants that deadlines are soft, which makes every future assessment harder to run.
When the project end date arrives, Interval 360 closes the assessment and synthesizes rater input automatically. No manual close step is required. Both reports generate the next day.
The Assessment Report goes to you and the participant's manager. It includes the What and the How scores, quadrant placement, and rater themes — formatted for talent decisions and development conversations. The Development Report goes to the participant and is built for coaching and growth work.
Schedule the participant's debrief conversation for within a week of report delivery. Feedback that sits unaddressed for several weeks loses context and urgency. The sooner the data is in a structured conversation, the more useful it is.
Ready to run your first assessment?
Reports generate automatically on your project close date, no waiting.