Managing Organizations and Structure

This month we created the supporting functionality for:

• Managing organizations and business units.
• Defining organizational structure.

What is an Organization?

In Basis HR terms, and organization is any collection of people. This includes the overall organization, but business units are also "organizations".

Each organization may have a parent, and any organization that has no parent is consider the "root" or "top" organization -- that is, the overall organization that utilizes talent management.

Basis HR allows multiple, top-level organizations to be managed in a single place. This isn't needed by many organizations but it is useful when an umbrella is required to manage large organizational structures.

Structure Versus Hierarchy

The current, nested design of organizations provides an interesting departure from your standard organizational chart. Organizations may be structured according to the strategic needs of the business and the operational requirements to achieve those needs.

This approach does not consider the people that fill positions within the structure of the organization. We'll be tackling that next month.

What it does consider is the business units that are required by an organization. These units naturally represent (or imply) the not just the skills required to operate, but also the resources such as equipment, buildings, time, money, and so on.

Conclusion

Defining the optimum organizational structure is a key part of strategic planning. We'll be integrating the organization tool with planning support in the future, but next month we will be working on features for job positions and employees.