Departments

All LMS users are inherently grouped by their basic profile assignments: Organization, Position, and Role. Portal Administrators can further organize users into functional groups by creating a Department structure or ad-hoc User Group. These categories can then be leveraged to configure unique lists of employees for the purposes of mass enrollment, announcements, activity reporting, and more.
 
This document provides step-by-step instructions on how to create a Department and manage employee membership. It will also explain the main drivers and key functionality of this LMS feature, which may ease many of your daily administrative processes.


GENERAL INFORMATION

A Department is a grouping of Positions across a Business Structure. Creating a Department is useful when you want a uniform way to organize users within Locations. For example, if you define a Sales and a Service department, every Location in your business structure will automatically include a Sales and a Service department.

By design, positions can only be associated with one department at a time.
 

Key Drivers and Functionality

Reasons you may want to consider classifying users as belonging to a Department:

  • User Search: All User Pickers and User Search pages allow you to filter results by Department. Because these search tools appear in many features throughout the LMS, having pre-defined groups can help simplify the user selection process. For example, you can use Department assignments to create a custom distribution list for ad-hoc Announcement messaging, or to batch enroll users who must complete specified courses to meet department training standards.
  • Reports: On some standard LMS activity reports, Department is an option in your selection criteria, either directly specified (as in the Ad Hoc Transcript report) or as an filter in selecting user for some User-related reports. 

Note: The term "Department" appears in other features of the LMS, but is not related to the data element Department described in this document. 

  • Competency Management: When creating Certification Programs, a Department Objective evaluation type can be included as a performance-driven requirement for completion. It is not tied in any way to established Departments.
  • Employee Oversight: On the Employees tab, there is an option to view Department Certification and Department Curriculum. These options allow managers to select a particular Program and Position Group to view all their related employees and their certification/curriculum status in one place. It is not specifically related to just Department Objective types of certifications and will show the status of certifications with any evaluation type. It also does not display employees based on Department assignment.

ADD A DEPARTMENT

To add Department as a sub-location level in your organizational structure:
 
  1. From the left navigation menu, select Organization => Add Department.
  2. Fill out all required fields, as marked by asterisks (*). Note: Administrators can provide the “Department Name” in multiple languages, but must first save it in English and then edit the record with translated content. Also, entering a date prior today’s date in the “Effective End Date” field will deactivate the Department.
  3. Click Select Positions to open the Position Picker.
  4. From the list of results, click Add for each position you want added to the group. You can review and edit the list of positions in the "Position Basket" on the left side of the window.
  5. Click Check Out to update the group.


  6. The list of positions to be added will appear at the bottom of the Add/Edit Department page, under the the “Select Positions” link. Click Submit to save changes. 

A message at the top of the page will confirm when your edit is successful.

Manage Members of a Department

Users are organized into Departments according to the Positions assigned in their active user profiles. The Positions within a Department, and therefore all associated users, can be edited at the Department level.

  1. From the left navigation menu, select Organization => Search Departments. 
  2. Conduct your search and click the department Name to open the Add/Edit Department page.
  3. Click Select Positions to open the Position Picker and make updates, noting that any changes made may affect other departments. (Remember that Positions can only be associated with one Department at a time.)
  4. Make your desired edits and click Submit to save changes.