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, a Position 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.
- Report: 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 a filter in selecting a user for some User-related reports.
Note: The term “Department” appears in other features of the LMS, including those below, 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 My Team page or 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.