Departments, roles and the org structure - Pacten Guides
Departments and roles are how the business is shaped. Under People → Organisation.
A department carries a name and colour, the roles that sit in it, and the people filling them. A role is a job rather than a person, which is what makes an open seat a visible thing rather than an absence.
WHY IT IS WORTH DOING EARLY
Other things depend on it
More than it looks.
- Approvals — one approver type routes to the head of the requester’s department, and cannot work at all without departments.
- Reporting — headcount, performance and payroll are all more useful grouped than flat.
- Open seats — roles with nobody in them are what turn hiring from a conversation into a number.
THE TWO HALVES
Structure and delegation live in different screens
This is the part that confuses people.
A department carries two different kinds of fact, owned by two different people, so they are edited in two different places.
1
Structure — People → Organisation
The name, the colour, which roles and which people sit in it. This is HR’s to maintain.
2
Delegation — Settings → Access
Who HEADS the department, and who administers app roles for its members. This is an access decision, so it lives with the other access decisions. Organisation shows it, read-only, so you can see it without being able to change it from the wrong screen.
Watch out
This is the answer to a common approvals problem. An approval step set to Head of department resolves to NOBODY until three things are true: the department exists, the requester is in it, and somebody is marked as its head in Settings → Access. Creating the department in Organisation does only the first of those, and nothing warns you about the rest.
TIDYING UP
Deleting a department
Its roles survive.
Deleting a department does not delete the roles in it — they become unfiled and can be moved somewhere else. That is deliberate: the alternative would silently destroy every job in a department somebody tidied up.
Making approvals work
All five approver types and what each needs first.