Departments

What is a Department?

A Department in StaffSavvy is an organisational feature that, if you choose to use it, will interact with many different areas of StaffSavvy. Departments have been designed to create a clear structure within your company by allowing you to do the following things.

IMPORTANT: Departments are an optional feature, that interact with many features within StaffSavvy. To use Departments you will need to enable the Permission to Create and Manage Departments. If you want staff to be able see Departments you will also have to enable the permission that allows you to be able to view Departments

How are Departments different from Venue Groups?

Whilst both features serve a purpose of separating different parts of your organisation, departments is a more complex and integrated version of this. Whilst Venue Groups allows you to filter to view only a specific venue, there were still many elements of the site that could be viewed by any staff member with the same access level. Departments can provide true separation of management and security for files, assets and personnel details.

Why are Departments useful?

Departments are a useful feature for several reasons but the main reasons are as follows:

• Assign Venues
  You can assign your different office spaces (venues) to a specific Department. This allows each Venue to belong to a Department, helping separate venues in companies that require organisational separation. Because of the way the hierarchy works - if you assign an asset to a department it will be viewable by that department and also any departments above it within the hierarchy.
   
• Limiting Access
  Departments give you the ability to limit access to features and items based on departments. Many items in StaffSavvy can now be assigned to a specific department and if enabled can only belong to a single department. This applies to many items in the system including Welfare and Performance forms, Contracts, Messages, Tasks, Alerts, Triggers, Certificates, Exams, Awards, Venues, Document types, Skills/Roles, Shift tasks, Tasks, News, clock in locations, personal records, recruitment positions, recruitment forms, training programs, steplists, case types, assets, & shift ranges.
   
• Establish a Hierarchy
  Departments have been designed so that you can create a chain of command in your organisation. Once you have created Departments you can go to the Hierarchy page which lets you quickly build and view this structure. Managers are able to add new chains to the hierarchy using the interactive buttons in the Visual Manager.

 How do you switch to your Department?

Once you have created Departments, you will want to access them. To view and switch between Departments, select the venue selector button at the top right of the screen. This will show you a list of all your Departments and allow you to select the one you want to schedule for from the Departments you have access to.

Creating a Department

Now we have established what a department is we will explain how to add them to your system. First, go to System > Departments & Venues > Manage Departments. From here, go to the actions bar and click Create Department. If this is not coming up, ensure you have enabled permissions for a system manager to create and edit Departments from the permissions level.

When creating a Department, you will need to give it a title, a place within the hierarchy and a description. 

If your department is at the top of the hierarchy you can select this option, otherwise select another department to report to. Once you have created a department, an option will come up to manually add staff to a department individually, which can be helpful if there are specific staff who need to be added. This can then be viewed under the Visual Manager that can be found via the actions bar on the Manage Departments page.

Creating a Hierarchy

Once you have created all the relevant departments within your company you can think about creating an organisational structure. Remember that once something has been assigned to a department, only staff within that department will have access to it, unless they are in a department that is hierarchically above them. So it is important to consider this when creating your department structure. 

What would this look like in practice? 

Let's consider what this would look like in practice. At the top of your company you might have a management department, which encompasses your management personnel who have access to a lot of important information and make company-wide decisions. This might include your CEO, Chief of Staff, and Chief of Operations. The management department would be at the top of the hierarchy and have access to everything assigned to that level.

From here you might have several different departments operating separately underneath. If we consider a theatre as an example, departments could include Front of House, Back of House and the Office. These departments have little interaction, so managers of these different departments might not need access to all information.

It is important to remember that assigning the permissions to view, manage, and edit departments grants access to a large amount of information. Therefore, we strongly recommend that this access typically be assigned to System Managers. Personnel with this permission will also benefit from a simpler organisational view when assigning assets, as they can now filter by department.

Assigning assets

Once you have created your structure you can start thinking about what assets you want to belong to your Department.

 Before implementing Departments, understand that you must individually assign assets to a department or your access will be affected when working in that Departments. 

Venues

When creating or editing a Venue, the first detail that appears is which Department the Venue belongs to. Once selected this will have a knock on effect on access as a venue can only belong to one Department (Or all Departments). You will also only be able to assign approved documents and forms available under this Department. 

Skills

Once applied to Venues, it is important to assign your Skills to the correct Venues as together these are the cornerstone elements for building up a department. To do this go to Staff > Staff Settings > Staff Skills. Then when editing or creating a Skill you will see the option to assign a Department. Some Skills should fit simply into certain Departments. For a Front of House department you might add, Bar Staff, Box office Staff, Ushers, Front of House Manager, Cloakroom Assistant and many other relevant roles.

Once assigned, only this department and departments above it will be able to edit or delete this Skill. To reiterate, once you assign a Skill to a Department, it will belong to that Department and they will have control over it. 

Forms

Forms can also be assigned to a department. Do this by going to  Systems > Documents & Forms > Manage Welfare & Performance forms and creating a new form. Under access and display you will see two new options. The first element to select is who owns the form. This means only this department and departments above it will be able to edit this form. In addition to this you can also set who this form is available to use. If selected, this means staff members assigned to the departments listed will be able to use this form, and be assigned this form but will not be able to edit or change the form itself.

Then, when you are viewing all forms, with the right access level, there is a search feature which allows you to filter by Department. This also allows you to see when a form has been shared across all departments.

Contracts

Contracts are set up similarly, with two department configuration options. 

• Contract Owner: The chosen Department and those above it in the hierarchy can edit this contract.

• Department Usage: The selected Departments (and those below them) can assign this contract to their staff, but they cannot edit the contract itself.

Other assets that can also be assigned to a Department include: Messages, Tasks, Alerts, Triggers, Certificates, Exams, Document Types, Shift Tasks, News, check-in Forms, clock-in locations, personal records, recruitment positions, recruitment forms, training programs, steplists, tasks, case types, assets, awards & shift ranges.
 

It is worth noting as well, that whilst assets like Templates of Deployments are not assigned to a Department, if you choose to assign them to a Venue, there will be a chain effect where you will only see templates depending on the the Department you are managing which must have been assigned a Department.