Departments and how to use them

Overview

Departments within a tenant allow an admin or company manager to set up structures for management and reporting within their company. This can further segregate users, allowing department managers to only see the users they are interested in or have managerial control over.

Let’s say Company A needs to split its staff into groups that are based in different locations and have different job functions. Managers only want to report (or manage) users that they are responsible for. Company A has locations in Glasgow, London, Cardiff and Dublin. Each location has an HR, Sales and Engineering function. Glasgow also has an Accounts department…

How to create a department

In the Company tab of the IOMAD dashboard, click on the Manage departments icon. From this page, you can create as many departments as you want in whatever structure you want. Departments are built in a tree structure with parent/child relationships. Click on the Create department button, then in the form, give it a long name and a shortname. As this is the top-level department in the use case above, this would be one of Glasgow, London, Sheffield or Dublin. Save changes to go back to the department structure.

Once you have one of the top-level departments created, you can either continue until you’ve got all top-level departments in place, or you can create the next-level departments underneath. The process is the same, except this time, click on the department you want to use as the parent before clicking on the Create department button. Keep working through the tree until you have created something that looks like this:

COMPANY A

        Glasgow - Engineering
              | - HR
              | - Sales
              | - Accounts
         London - Engineering
              | - HR
              | - Sales
        Cardiff - Engineering
              | - HR
              | - Sales
         Dublin - Engineering
              | - HR
              | - Sales

You can edit any of the company departments to change its name, shortname, or parent department at any time by clicking on the department from the picker, and then the Edit button. Alternatively, you can delete a department instead by clicking on the Delete button.

How to assign users to departments

Once you have the department structure set up for the tenant, you can start to assign users to these departments. There are three basic roles which can be assigned:

User

Standard user in the tenant

Department manager

Manager-type role that has rights to manage and report on users within their department and any sub-departments

Report only

A user who has access to the IOMAD reporting functions on users from within their department and any sub-departments

You can assign users and roles in a couple of ways:

From the Edit users page under the Users tab in the IOMAD dashboard (available in IOMAD 4.0 and above):

1. Click on the edit switch.
2. Click on the pencil next to the list of departments on the row for a user.
3. Add and remove the departments the user should be in and click the save icon.
4. Click on the down arrow next to the user role on their row and then select their new role from the drop-down.

From the Department users & managers page under the Users tab in the IOMAD dashboard:

1. Select the department you want to put users into from the department picker and the role you want to assign to them from the drop-down menu.
2. Search for and add the user(s) you want to assign to that department.
3. If you want to have these users in only this department, you need to choose the department they had been in and then search and remove them from that department. If you remove users from all currently allocated departments, they will be allocated to the top-level/company department.

Now, whenever you are presented with the department picker, you can select a department, and you will only be able to view users who are in that department or any sub-department of it. Any department manager user or report-only user will only be able to see the departments they are assigned to and any sub-department of them. So, in the example layout above:

• A department manager allocated to Glasgow will see all of the users in Glasgow and the Accounts, Engineering, HR and Sales departments underneath it.
• A department manager who is assigned to Sales in Sheffield will only be able to see users in that department only.
• Users can be assigned to multiple departments, including department managers and report-only users.
• As users will see the specific list of departments (and sub-departments) that they have been given access to, it may be important to name the departments accordingly so that they are not presented with 4 departments all labelled Engineering with no way of knowing which is which.

NOTE: Company managers can only be assigned at the top level of a company. If you need to have further granularity in your company structures, then consider using parent and child companies as well as departments.