Tip: Managing Courses
Legacy Horizon Planner did not provide a convenient and structured way to manage for example course attendance or equipment maintenance: users typically had to resort to using marked “holidays” for these purposes. The fundamental design changes we’ve made at the very beginning of the project fix these shortcomings. In this post we will briefly describe a possible setup for managing such tasks better.
Structure is value. Modeling courses, maintenance, or other similar tasks as holidays works adequately as long as it is certain that there will be no need to answer even very basic questions such as “How many employees attended course X during the last quarter?”, “Who will attend the next certificate renewal exam?”, or “How many days equipment X was unavailable for because of maintenance over the past year?”. Otherwise structure becomes essential.
So what kind of structure should be created? Well, it depends on many factors from internal requirements to company size and industry. What we will describe in the following sections is a solution for courses that is towards the complex end of possibilities, but at the same time one that should be easy to simplify and customize.
Initial setup
These are the time consuming steps (when done manually), but the good news are they must be done only once and we could even automate the whole process for you.
The first step is to create a new organization (say “Courses”) where all course-related data will be located. There are many benefits to having course-related data in a separate organization, such as easy discoverability, uniqueness, and fine-grained access control. Once the organization is ready, you must add permissions to it for users who are responsible for managing course-related activities.
At this point, the “Courses” organization is completely empty. The next step is to set up a couple of projects that will contain the specific course activities. Project names can vary a lot from company to company, here are a couple of fairly generic examples: “Certificates”, “Internal”, “Medical”, “Safety” etc..
Under each project, create the course activities that belong there. Activity names should be the exact course names (e.g. “Airline Transport Pilot”, “Flight Review”, “Medical Review”), because it’s the activity name that shows up in calendars and timetables. When activities are ready, at least one role should be added to each of them, with the capabilities that are required to undertake the specific course.
Daily use
Once the “Courses” organization - along with its projects and activities - is ready, course attendance could be managed in the same way as any other task/assignment: simply add assignments to course activities.
Notes
We haven’t really discussed resources yet. To be able to send an employee on a course, an equipment to maintenance, and so on, the resource must be available in the organization where the activity belongs. The good thing is adding resources to these organizations can be done incrementally (on Resources view), not to mention that it could even be automated.