Department & Group Structure Best Practices

Departments and Groups are organizational tools that help structure your LMS to align with your training goals and administrative needs. This guide provides best practices for planning and implementing effective Department and Group structures, including discovery questions, implementation strategies, and key considerations for creating a structure that supports your organization's unique requirements.

Planning Your Structure

Before creating Departments and Groups, engage with stakeholders using these discovery questions to ensure your structure aligns with organizational needs:

Discovery Questions

The following questions may help determine the structure you need, or requirements that need to be met:

• Do you have a corporate structure you would like to emulate in SkillSync?
• Do you need Department level Admins?
• How do you want to report on your Learners?
• What criteria do you wish to use for reporting?

Department Structure Overview

A Department is a required feature used to organize and classify Users. Each User must belong to one Department only.

Departments are structured hierarchically. Upon the creation of a portal, a Parent Department (the top-level Department) is automatically generated. Any additional Departments created will exist beneath the Parent Department in this hierarchy.

Department Hierarchy Example

The Finance Department is 1 level below the Corporate Department. The AR/AP Department is a sub-department to the Finance Department and the AR/AP Department is 2 levels below the Corporate Department.

Departments follow a hierarchical structure, similar to an organizational chart. This hierarchy makes the Department field distinct from other User fields.

Common Department Uses

Departments are commonly used for the following purposes:

• Course Assignments: To assign Courses and trainings to Learners within the Department.
• Course Administrators: To limit Admin's access for Course Visibility via the Courses Report. Can be All Admins, Department or Group.
  • Very useful for multi-tenancy LMS.
• Admin Access Control: To limit an Admin's access to Users within the selected Department, including Sub-Departments.
• Custom Learner Dashboards: To assign tailored Learner Dashboards for specific Departments which can also be tied to their unique URL.

Department Best Practices

The following are important to keep in mind when creating Departments.

Unique Department Names

It is strongly recommended to use unique names for each Department to prevent confusion.

Integration with HRIS

If a client integrates with an HRIS (such as ADP, Bamboo, UKG, etc.), the Departments listed in the HRIS typically populate into the LMS upon User account import. As a result, Admins usually do not need to manually create Departments when User accounts are created via HRIS integration.

Make sure to review the configuration of your HRIS system and how it integrates with SkillSync LMS.

Hierarchical Structure

Departments operate within a hierarchy. Rules can be established to make items available exclusively to the selected Department or to both the Department and its Sub-Departments. This includes assignments for Department Admins and Enrollment Rules.

Groups Overview

Groups offer a useful way to organize users within the system, especially when the Department hierarchy or custom fields don't provide the necessary structure.

Groups can be manually managed or can be automated via assignment rules similar to enrollment rules, which would be best practice to avoid manual interaction and human error.

Prioritize creating Departments before establishing Groups.

Why Create Groups

Here are several suggestions on why we would use Groups:

• Groups are a great resource for complex Enrollment Rules.
• Groups can be used in anything that requires Availability rules.
• Groups may be beneficial for assigning Courses to a cohort of Managers with different job titles across various Departments.
• Groups can be used for Admin purposes, you may have a Admin that manages a team that spans across Departments.
• Groups can be used to easily report on special projects which run for a limited time as opposed to filtering by Departments, standard fields, custom fields, etc.

Reporting and Scheduling

Admins may also create one or more Groups to facilitate scheduling or sharing reports with Users within those Groups.

Department vs Group Comparison

The following table acts as a quick reference to determine how a Department or Group compares across different components or elements.

Feature	Departments	Groups
Mandatory Assignment	Required for all Users	Optional
Number of Associations	One per User	Multiple per User
Creation Requirement	Must be selected during User creation	Not required
Hierarchy	Structured hierarchically	No hierarchical structure
Reporting Visibility	Appears in most reports	May not appear in all reports
Learner Dashboards	Default and custom dashboards available	No specific dashboard assignment

Reporting

Departments will appear in most, if not all, reports, whereas Groups may not be included in all reports.

Learner Dashboards

Learner Dashboards can be assigned to Departments. By default, one Learner Dashboard is created for the Parent Department and serves as the default for all Departments. Custom Learner Dashboards can also be created for individual Departments.

Structure Examples

Departments are arranged in a hierarchical parent-child relationship. Most reports, settings and rules in SkillSync can reference a specific Department, or a Department along with its Sub-Departments.

Groups can be set up using automatic filtering rules and Users that meet those rules will be automatically added to that Group.

In the Groups report there are no child or parent associations. The report displays an overview of the number of Users in each, how the Users are added, as well as created and edited dates. Unlike Departments, Groups are primarily used for performing bulk actions on otherwise unrelated Users.

For example, to offer specific training to Managers across Departments, you could create an Automatic Group based on the User Field Job Title containing Manager. You could then set Availability Rules on Courses, Resources, Billboards, etc. that would only be accessible to those that meet the requirements of that Group, regardless of their Department.

Blended Department Structure

There are a few different methods of separating internal Users from external Users in SkillSync. The recommended way to achieve this is to first create two new Departments called internal and external at the highest level of your Department hierarchy. If you are selling Course content or are administrating your LMS for your own clients, it may be valuable to consider this use-case.

It is important to note that there is a distinction between the Blended Billing Model, where Users are defined as External or Internal for the purposes of billing, and a manually implemented Department structure with named Departments such as internal or external.

For more information about the Blended Billing Model review the following article:

• Frequently Asked Billing Questions

One method for creating a unique experience for different selections of Users in SkillSync is to create and use separate URLs, separately or in conjunction with custom branding and Department Templates based on the Department that the Users are in.

As an example, we could have one Department called internal set up to access SkillSync using a custom URL, login page, and see a custom design specific to the Department. Our second, external Department would access SkillSync using an altogether different custom URL, and see a different login page, and custom design specific to their Department.

You will need to contact your Client Success Manager or Account Manager to have new URL routes created.