Templated organizations based on dataset values
Organization templates allow you to quickly roll out similar scorecard structures to multiple organizations. When your organizations have dataset KPIs, this process is even easier.
In this example we have an organization called “Templated Sales Example” that has two KPIs. “Number of Sales” tracks the total number of sales over time, and “Sales $” tracks the value of sales over time. As you can see here, there were $797,000 in sales in July 2021.
We’re going to click on the organization name on top to expand the organization pane, and then put the organization tree into edit mode by clicking on the Edit button on the bottom. Then we’ll click on our “Templated Sales Example” organization and choose “Copy as Template”.
This opens the new template dialog. The first copy option would create a single copy of our organization. The middle option does the same thing, but would also copy any descendant organizations that we create later. We’re going to choose the third option to “Create a copy of ‘Templated sales example’ for every value of a dataset field”.
Our two KPIs are created from the Device Sales dataset, so we’ll choose that here. We’ll also choose the Sales Employee field. If we decide to not add any filters, Impact will create a separate organization for every sales employee.
Finally, we’re going to add a filter to only include records where the sales department is Retail. When you apply a filter, it restricts the records, which in turn can restrict the number of organizations that are created. So, rather than creating an organization for every sales employee, we’re going to create an organization for every *retail* sales employee.
The last step in the wizard is to optionally add prefixes or suffixes to the names of templated items. We’ll just click Copy.
After a few seconds, new organizations start to appear in the organization tree underneath our template. There are 6 organizations, one for every retail employee.
When we click on Delphine Calmes, we can see that the KPIs now show data specific to that employee. Delphine had $53,000 in sales in July 2021.
Just like with all organization templates in Impact, you can create additional KPIs in the template and they’ll be automatically copied to the templated copies. You can also create KPIs in the templated copy organizations to track things for only that organization.
Organization permissions for rollup tree groups
In the example above we created a templated organization for every member of our retail sales team. If you choose to create templated organizations based on a rollup tree field, however, templates become even more powerful.
Let’s create more templated organizations, this time based on values in the “Unit” field, which is a rollup tree field. As soon as we choose this rollup tree field, the Organization Permissions panel appears.
If you’re not familiar with dataset rollup tree groups, we’d recommend reading the “Dataset Rollup Tree Groups” section of the Dataset Rollup Trees support article. The general idea, however, is that you can assign people to different types of positions at different levels of your rollup tree.
In this example we have a rollup tree based on military units, but your rollup tree could easily be your company’s org chart, or thousands of retail stores organized into regions. As you can see, we’ve selected the “Forces Command” item in the rollup tree, and we’ve added one person as an IT Administrator, one person as a Manager, and three people as standard employees. At every level of the rollup tree we can assign different people to these three rollup tree groups.
With that explanation out of the way, let’s go back to creating our templated organizations. Because we’ve selected a rollup field, the Organization Permissions panel shows, and we can add the IT Administrators rollup tree group.
What happens next is deceptively simple, but incredibly powerful. By adding IT Administrators to the Organization Permissions, we have just given every IT Administrator access to view their organization and the organizations underneath it. It’s assigning potentially thousands of permissions at once.
We also get to choose the actions our IT Administrators can do. We’ve chosen to make them Power Users, but we’ll also click the Actions button to make sure they’re getting the exact actions we want.
And, just as quickly, we’ll give all of our Standard Employees permissions to their organizations, but for them it will be at a View Only level.
Just to be sure, we’ll click on Actions to make sure our Standard Employees can do the correct things.
Finally, we’ll add a filter so we don’t create tens of thousands of organizations. Our rollup tree is the entire US Army chain of command tree with 40,000+ units that goes 8+ levels deep. We’ll instead only create high-level organizations by adding a filter for US Army Commands, their children, and their grandchildren.
There’s a nuance worth noting about filters that only applies to rollup trees. If the filter is for the same rollup tree field as the field you’re using for the template, the filter only restricts the organizations you create. The descendant totals continue to be included for the KPIs. To put it another way, this filter is restricting the number of organizations created, but those organizations’ dataset KPIs still contain totals from records lower on the rollup tree that may not have organizations.
When we click Next, we’re asked to confirm that we want to create 131 organization.
Once we’ve confirmed and finished, there are now 131 new organizations, each with templated scorecards, dashboards, and reports showing their data.
More importantly, however, is the fact that thousands of users can now see their appropriate organization, and they have permission to do the appropriate actions based on their position. For example, this is what the “standard employee” Max Montgomery sees when he logs into the software. He can only see Forces Command and below, and there’s no Edit button under the organization tree because he’s just a standard employee.