Best practice forum (Archived)

TOTARA Sync of Secondary Positon

 
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TOTARA Sync of Secondary Positon
de ? ? - Friday, 25 de July de 2014, 05:53
 

Good afternoon all!

I have a requirement to bulk associate circa 2300 learners with a manager entry in the Secodary Position.

I cannot see in either the TOTARA Sync help or the Sync admin pages anywhere to target this.

Is this an undocumented feature that is possible with the correct knowledge?

If yes could that info be shared?

Many thanks

Ben

Daniel Bond
Re: TOTARA Sync of Secondary Positon
de Daniel Bond - Friday, 25 de July de 2014, 06:15
Grupo Most helpful contributor 2023

I'm 99% sure that it's not in Totara Sync, I suspect mostly because Secondary positions don't really seem to do anything very useful.

I know that enhancing Secondary positions is on the roadmap for future Totara development, but currently the feature appears to be purely informational rather than functional. As long as you're aware of that, Secondary positions aren't a bad way of recording an additional role, but the manager won't (as far as I'm aware) get the member of staff in their MY TEAM tab, any rights to view their profile, the ability to participate in the member of staff's appraisal as manager, etc.

Just wanted you to be aware before commencing a large piece of work!

Regards

Dan

me
Re: TOTARA Sync of Secondary Positon
de George Angus - Sunday, 27 de July de 2014, 19:16
Grupo Totara

Hi Ben,

Its just for information at the moment, but we will be putting up an enhancements survey in the near future to help us prioritise our workload. There is some earlier discussion of this functionality here

regards,

George.

Daniel Bond
Re: TOTARA Sync of Secondary Positon
de Daniel Bond - Monday, 28 de July de 2014, 01:53
Grupo Most helpful contributor 2023

Given the discussions are in the Partner area, a lot of people are unlikely to have been aware of them, and a lot of people here won't be able to see or comment on them. Would it be possible for a copy to be posted on this forum so that we can get a bit of insight as to the current think on this feature?

Thanks

Dan

me
Re: TOTARA Sync of Secondary Positon
de George Angus - Monday, 28 de July de 2014, 16:47
Grupo Totara

Hi Dan,

Unfortunately I can't move the discussion - but here are the salient points:

"

Support secondary/aspirational positions (including multiple managers) You will be aware that user profiles have Secondary (and Aspirational) positions. These do not trigger any kind of learning, and are more for information purposes at present.

It is a much featured request in the forums (such as this post today).

We hear from you regularly that it is common for job sharing to occur, for people to have more than one position and for people to have more than one manager. We would like to ask for partners to share what that means for learning management requirements  that they are hearing from clients around use cases for supporting:

  • secondary positions
  • aspirational positions and
  • multiple managers

so that we can start to build some common requirements."

"

We've found that this kind of functionality is mostly requested by healthcare organisations here in the Netherlands. Nurses quite often have two contracts that really function as two seperate positions. Learning requests need to be approved by one of the two managers, as he/she is responsible for his/her own budget.

The scenario usually requires support for departmental training budgets as well. To be quite frank these two things seem really intertwined. Accommodating multiple positions/managers is helpful but it probably wouldn't be enough for these type of prospects. They need multiple positions/managers to facilitate proper accounts management."

"

What we really need is the ability to:

  • add multiple positions to a user (not limited to just two + aspirational) - it's frequent for users to hold many simultaneous positions, particularly in an organisation that has job shares or uses bank/contract staff;
  • assign multiple managers to each position. 

An aspirational position would be useful if it supported gap analysis against goals/competencies."

"

With multiple managers assigned to each position, how do you imagine notifications and approvals would work?

If a user needs approval for something, should a notification go to one specific manager or all managers? If its the former how would the system know which user to send it to?

For approval, can any manager approve things or just one? For reporting, would the user show up under "My team" for each manager?

Finally, if one manager approves something, would you expect the other managers to be notified?"

"

We have implemented a form of multi-stage approval:

  1. Primary manager receives message for approval
  2. If he denies, it is game over
  3. If he accepts, he can decide whether a 2nd approval is needed and picks another user, e.g. from the Finance dept.
  4. and so on

This is very bespoke to a particular customer. I am wondering whether there is room to have one or many "approvers" sitting alongside managers. A user has a line manager (primary) plus a deputy manager (secondary). The line manager also acts as the approver (1st approver) and somebody from Finance has to sign it off (second approver)."

"

One question I have is, how do people feel about the current approach of using position types (primary, secondary, aspirational) as a container for several other pieces of data (title, position, organisation, manager, temp manager)?

When people have multiple positions, do they typically fit with that model?

One option we have is to keep the current position types model, but make the position types customisable at the site level and allow unlimited instead of just three options.

A second option would be to remove the position types concept and support multiple positions, organisations, managers etc, but directly attached to the users like other profile fields."

"

This feature has been requested by several of our Puiblic Sector customers - there is no real pattern to how people share job roles/positions, several people have 3 roles/positions within the same organisation but with different managers.

I think as long as it's flexible enough to allow for multiple combinations/permutations of pos,org,mgr it'll work well.

 

Has anyone thought about taking the aspirational position across into competencies? So today I'm a developer, but my aspirational position is a Team Lead.

Competencies for Developer are one,two,three

Competencies for Team Lead are  seven, eight, nine  plus all developer and senior developer competencies

I'm competent in one and two, but missing four, five, six (senior developer), seven, eight, nine (Team Lead)

Which is a training needs analysis. It would be nice if I could create a learning plan as a manager that automatically pulled in the competencies that I need to get to complete to get to my aspirational position."

"

This is definitely something we want to do at some point but I see it as a separate issue that we'll need to look at separately (in order to keep the scope of this feature small enough to be achievable).

Once this is implemented though I would imagine that an "aspirational" position could in fact be any position type, there wouldn't be anything special about an aspirational position type other than it was the one selected for this kind of comparison."

 

 

 

 

 

Alex Büchner
Re: TOTARA Sync of Secondary Positon
de Alex Büchner - Monday, 28 de July de 2014, 23:08
 

I can echo the requirement for a more flexible way to assign multiple positions to users with different types of managers. Ideally, it should be possible to specify what role the manager has in the context of the user, e.g. for approval, reporting, appraisals, etc.

Alex Büchner - Synergy Learning

Daniel Bond
Re: TOTARA Sync of Secondary Positon
de Daniel Bond - Tuesday, 29 de July de 2014, 08:44
Grupo Most helpful contributor 2023

"One option we have is to keep the current position types model, but make the position types customisable at the site level and allow unlimited instead of just three options.

A second option would be to remove the position types concept and support multiple positions, organisations, managers etc, but directly attached to the users like other profile fields."

I would say mostly the first option. We're not really interested in a position being "primary" or "secondary", what we want is that one person can have multiple positions that all work in the same way. Each position would allow a job title, manager, organisation and position to be assigned, and each would function as a separate job as far as appraisals, learning plans, etc. are concerned.

Things like course completion and program assignment would still sit at the user level. Someone might have two positions which both assign them to a program, but it doesn't make sense to assign them twice. In the case of learning plans, two learning plans assigned to two different positions might have their criteria fulfilled ("complete x course" or "gain y competency") at the same time because both learning plans have elements in common. It may be that both managers include "complete your Information Governance course", but the member of staff only has to do it once to complete both plans. On the other hand, appraisals sit at the position level, because appraisals relate to performance in a specific role with a specific manager.

As for multiple managers and aspirational positions, I totally agree that they are separate issues to multiple positions and should be considered separately. We would of course love to have proper gap analysis and the ability to have more than one manager, but not if it's going to delay or interfere with the development of multiple positions.

Regards

Dan

GianLuca BRAMBATI
Re: TOTARA Sync of Secondary Positon
de Gianluca Brambati - Monday, 27 de October de 2014, 09:54
Grupo Partners
For our Customer installation it's necessary insert/update approximately 1.000 secondary position and would be very useful implement SYNC to do this. Thx
Simon Coggins
Re: TOTARA Sync of Secondary Positon
de Simon Coggins - Friday, 10 de April de 2015, 11:16
Grupo Totara

Hi Dan,

I'd just like to follow up on this point:

We're not really interested in a position being "primary" or "secondary", what we want is that one person can have multiple positions that all work in the same way.

I've just been considering if I can make user positions completely independent from a site-wide "type" like primary or secondary. Unfortunately I ran into a few issues:

  • We may want to allow admins to configure rules relating to certain positions (like you must specify your organisation for the primary position but not secondary). For that to work we need "named" positions.
  • Totara Sync would need to be able to identify the position across the site so data for multiple users could be synced into a single position "type".
  • When assigning learning "to a position" you need something that's consistent across users to assign to.

While some of these things could be worked around by allowing "custom" positions as well as named ones, my preference for simplicity would be to require the admin to create positions before people could populate them.

In your case it might mean creating a bunch of positions (Position 1-10 say) to make sure there are enough available for use.

Can you foresee any major problems with that approach?

Simon