Organizational Units and Other Business Resources

Innovator for Business Analysts primarily uses org charts as a special form of business resources diagram for modeling organizational units. The org chart is configured in the standard profile in such a way that you can model your organizational structure with all people in charge. Business resources can be organizational units, IT elements and roles. The chapter explains the basic terms used when modeling your organizational structures.

The following base elements are available when modeling the structures in your organization:

• Organizational Unit

  The concept of modeling departments, positions, boards or teams. Organizational units can be assigned hierarchically using a special hierarchical relationship. This relationship is only permissible between organizational units.

  An organizational unit has one person in charge from the Person type and an optional cover person from the Person type. Both of these people can be visualized as their own elements in the org chart. It is also possible to select common variants of the visualization and show the name of the department's manager or employee in the organizational unit.

• Role

  Roles and positions are orthogonal to each other as concepts. Roles are not hierarchical. You can use them to model what an employee does within a certain process in the sense of the process aim, i.e. what function they participate in within the process. A position can require the position's applicant to carry out various roles. An employee can enter various roles which they can take on due to their competence and experience.

  Example: The position software engineer stipulates that the developer, programmer, tester and document editor roles can be taken on. An employee who is assigned to the position should be able to take on at least one of these roles but this does not have to be obligatory. This is why you will assign your test process to the role Tester and not the Developer position. In this way you can express that certain processes require certain competencies and it is not the position which is decisive as the position may have the necessary competencies but they are not guaranteed.

• Person

  A person normally models an employee. You can enter which position a person has and which roles they can take on.

• IT Element

  You can use IT elements to model your IT infrastructure. These elements are not available in the org chart as only operational organization should be described there.

• Business Resource

  The business resource is a very general resource element. A business resource should only be used if the other special concepts are not suitable for what you want to model. It is a model element with no special function. You can use the resources type to make resources look like roles or organizational units; they will, however, not behave like them, i.e. the relationships listed below cannot be used for the general business resources. It has a very general relationship equivalent which can only be used when linking business resources - the relationship between business resources.

The following options are available when modeling relationships between resources:

• Hierarchical Subordination

  You can link organizational units hierarchically to e.g. assign a position to a department. The relationship runs from the top to the subordinate organizational unit. In the example above, the relationship would therefore run from the department to the position. if your model configuration permits this, the position is also subordinated to the department in the model hierarchy so that you can find the position below the department in the model structure.

• Assign to a Person

  Set the employee for a position and set the manager of the unit for a larger organization via the person's assignment. This is a relationship from an organizational unit to a person. No more than two such assignments can exist per organizational unit: one for the main person in charge and one for the cover person. Do not drag the person in charge into the diagram and then connect it with a relationship if you want to make an assignment like this - you will soon find that your org chart becomes muddled. As you can only have one person in charge and one cover person, you can also set both people as properties of the organizational unit and visualize the names of the people with the organizational unit's graphic element.

• Person's Affiliation

  The affiliation works in the same way as the assignment of the organizational unit to a person but is weaker than an assignment. The person assigned is not defined as having a particular title such as manager or cover person. You only model the fact that a person is assigned to an organizational unit, e.g. to a task force or a committee.

• Role Requirement

  You can use role requirement to set for an organizational unit (normally a position) which roles the person can carry out which the position requires. If you formulate a role requirement starting from a larger organizational unit, this is more aimed towards the managerial position implicitly contained within the organizational unit.

• Role Assignment

  You can assign various possible roles to a person to show that this person or employee is capable of carrying out these roles. If you use roles as activity resources in your BPMN processes, this gives you information about which employees or people can be active in the respective process.

• Relationship Between Business Resources

  A relationship which you rename and can use to have what ever meaning you choose. You can create multiple relationships of this kind between any number of resources.