Assessment Manager allows you to create, distribute, and manage privacy and compliance assessments across your organization. An assessment consists of a survey sent to one or more respondents, with configurable approval workflows, scheduling, and reporting options.
This article explains how to create a new assessment, including how to complete each configuration section: Details, Managers & Respondents, Users, and Advanced Settings.
To create a new assessment, follow these steps:
From the left side of the page, hover over the Assessment Manager icon (1), then select Assessments (2).
In the upper-right corner of the page, click Create Assessment (3).
Assessment Name
Enter a unique name for the assessment.
Template
Select an existing Assessment Template — either pre-configured by TrustArc or by your company's privacy team — or create a new one. Templates that are associated with a particular assessment configuration are marked with an AAC indicator.
An Assessment Template defines the questions in the survey, the question flow logic, the compliance and risk assignment logic, and many other aspects of the assessment.
For information on how to create custom templates, see Creating a New Assessment Template.
Record to Assess
If you have both Assessment Manager and Data Mapping & Risk Manager, this field allows you to associate the assessment with a record — such as a business process, company affiliate, primary company, department, system, or vendor. The template's question flow logic can then draw on information from that record. You can select two or more records at the same time.
To associate a new Data Mapping & Risk Manager record, click Add New Record and select a record type. The system redirects you to the relevant Data Mapping & Risk Manager page where you can create the record.
Description
Provide a clear, detailed description of the initiative — including relevant URLs if applicable. Where available, attach supporting documentation such as process flow diagrams or presentations. The description appears on the survey start page shown to respondents, and in email notifications sent to assessment stakeholders. Use it to explain the purpose of the assessment and provide instructions to respondents before they begin.
Use this section to set the owner, approvers, and respondents for the assessment. For details on each role, see Understanding the Different Assessment Manager User Roles.
Assessment Owner
The assessment creator is the default owner.
Owning Entity
Assign an owning entity to the assessment. The dropdown list contains all entities from the Organisation Hierarchy platform. If an entity is deleted or updated in Organisation Hierarchy, that change is automatically reflected in any associated assessments.
Approvers
Each assessment must have one or more approvers, who approve the assessment after all respondents have submitted their answers. A reviewer — who can be the assessment creator, owner, or one of the approvers — is responsible for reviewing the submitted answers and resolving any identified issues.
Approvers can be added in tiers. Enter the first-tier approvers in the Tier 1 field (1) — the assessment creator is added by default. To add a subsequent tier, click Add New Tier (2) and enter the names of those approvers. Only system users can be added as approvers.
Respondent
By default, the assessment is assigned to you — the creator. To assign it to someone else, remove your name from the System users field (3) and select the intended respondent. If that person is not yet registered, click Add New System User (4). Registration may take up to 30 minutes; the new user receives a password reset email once their account is active.
You can also assign the assessment to external individuals — for example, a contact at a vendor company. To do so, click the Non-system users field (5) and select the person from the dropdown. If they are not yet registered, click Add New Non-system User (6).
Participants
An Assessment Participant is a user who, without being assigned another role, has read access to the assessment and can view the respondents' answers. You can add multiple participants.
Non-System Participants
External users you wish to add as assessment participants.
Assessment Expiration
The expiration date is the date after which respondents can no longer submit their answers, unless a privacy officer explicitly extends it or email reminders are configured below.
Allow Assessment to be Deleted
Setting this to No prevents users from manually deleting the assessment. To delete a protected assessment, the Assessment Creator, Assessment Owner, or a user with Admin or Data Privacy Officer privileges must first return to the Edit Assessment page and set this field to Yes.
Workflow
Override the default workflow with the TrustArc default workflow without acceptance if you do not want to require remediation of identified issues before approvers can approve the assessment. For details on the difference between workflows, see Assessment Manager Workflows.
Assessment Config (advanced)
Select an assessment configuration to override specific settings inherited from the parent assessment. The following settings can be superseded:
Email Reminders
Configure the assessment to send periodic reminders to respondents. Set the interval (in days) in the Email reminder frequency field (1). Once a non-zero value is entered, the Start reminders field (2) becomes available to set when reminders should begin. Use the Message to include in reminders field (3) to add a custom message to the automated reminder emails.
Schedule and Revalidation
Click Configure next to Schedule and Revalidation to set assessment-level revalidation settings. For more information, see Configuring the Assessment Revalidation Settings on an Assessment Level.
Assign one or more custom labels to the assessment, regardless of whether custom fields are in use. Labels can be used to filter assessments on the Assessments page. Start typing the label name — the system displays suggestions based on labels already created by other users.
Labels can also be assigned to individual answer choices, so that when a respondent answers a question in a particular way, the system automatically assigns the corresponding label to the assessment. This is useful for tracking assessments where specific questions were answered in a specific way.
For more information, see Using Assessment Labels.
All tags and tag groups associated with Assessment Manager appear in this section. You can create a new tag value or associate the assessment with an existing value from a predefined tag group.
The order of tags in this section follows the ordering configured on the Associations page. For more information, see Changing the Order of Tags in the Assessment Wizard.
Click Comments & Attachments to add comments and supporting documents to the assessment. A commenting section appears below the link after you click it.