This article describes how the new organization management tool is different than the classic team and member administration. This article highlights what's changing for enterprise admins and team managers who are familiar with the classic administration tools.
This article contains the following sections:
Licenses and Roles
One of the most important and most impactful changes is to licenses and roles. In the classic system, you bought licenses for team members and administrators. You are probably familiar with this view of your licenses on the Members page of your account.
We've found that this approach doesn't offer the flexibility that many of our enterprises need to reflect the different roles their people play with training through Cloud Academy.
The new organization management approach gives more flexibility by separating the ideas of "what tools does the user need in the platform" from "what role does the user play in the organization" from "what role does the user play on the team."
First question: will the user be training?
Regardless of whether a user is also leading a team or administering the system, the first question is the same: does this person need access to the training content? If the user will be training, then they take up one of your paid licenses. If the user will not be training, then they can join for free.
This means that you have the freedom to invite managers, API users, and any other stakeholders you can think of to access the management tools, analytics, and reports; as long as they don't also want to complete the training courses, they can join for free.
Second question: does the user need admin tools?
An administrator user is in charge of things like:
- Account settings
- Integrations, such as setting up single sign-on
- Creating the client ID and client secret you need to write code with the API
Administrators also can do the things team managers do, except while team managers are limited to acting on their own teams, administrators can act on the whole organization.
If the user needs access to the administrator tools, you can set the user up as an admin when you first invite them, or you can change the user to an admin later.
Third question: what is the user's role on the team?
Whereas the first two questions deal with the user's role in the Cloud Academy account, this question asks about the user's role on their team. A user can be a
- Team member
- Team manager
- Team stakeholder
Each user can have only one of these roles for a particular team, but if the user is part of different teams, they could potentially have a different role on each one.
A team member completes the training that is assigned to them or that they assign to themselves. Team members can see their own skill profile.
A team manager can do things like:
- Invite people to join the team
- Assign training to the team
- See the analytics and reports for their own team and for members of that team
A team stakeholder needs the information about the team's progress but doesn't have the responsibility of managing it, so a stakeholder has read-only access to assignments and analytics. In the classic approach, you designated stakeholders for the entire company. The new organization management approach gives you better flexibility and control over who has access to different teams' information.
See more details in the following articles:
Team Hierarchy
Another very big change in the new organization management approach is the ability to reflect your team hierarchy. Many companies, especially large corporations, may have many levels of teams and subteams. Previously the administration tools had no way to reflect these levels, but now you can make a team hierarchy as deep as your org chart.
Creating your team hierarchy works from the top down, so you create teams and then you add subteams to those teams. You can also create subteams under those teams as well. You can create as many layers as you need to reflect your hierarchy.
When you assign training to a parent team, you also assign it to all the subteams. This can be very useful to assigning whole divisions training at the same time. Similarly, when you view analytics for a parent team, you see the aggregated data for the subteams as well.
Read more in the Organizations article.
Navigating Changes
If you're used to the old navigation menu on the left side of the screen, you'll definitely notice how much this new approach has streamlined your options.
Of course, with this new team hierarchy you need to be able to navigate to the teams you want to manage when you're doing things like assigning assessments, assigning Training Plans, or running reports. You'll still perform these tasks the same way you're used to, only when you're choosing the teams, you'll see an intuitive new interface to help you navigate to the team that you want.
