Creating org structures in Charts (for Charts Admins)

Introduction

Once you've imported your people and have begun building your Team Charts in the Teams view, you can use the flexibility of the view to clarify a wide variety of different kinds of teams and structures in your organization. This article shows some examples of such structures and how to create them in a Chart.

Table of contents:

1. Matrix organizations
2. Community of practice
3. Self-managed teams
4. Collaborators
5. Using Collaborators to show a management board
6. One team with two managers

1. Matrix organizations

Matrix structures are common in larger organizations, most commonly with "functional groups" on one axis and "business units" on the other. Whichever is the main structure (most often business units) shows as solid-line relationships, whereas the secondary structure shows as dotted-line relationships. By clicking on cards to navigate, you can gain a clear view of each in the Teams view.

This example includes a Chart for a DevOps team (remember, clicking on a Chart name in the left column of Teams will bring it up for display, like below).

In this structure, Crash Graham is a dotted line report to Chris, the VP of DevOps:

If we click on Crash's card above, it moves into the centric position and we can see that Fernando, the VP of Support, is his 'solid line' supervisor.

Each Role can only have a single solid (primary) reports-to relationship. However, a Role can have multiple dotted-line (secondary) reports-to relationships. A card that reports up with a dotted line, cannot have any relationships under it.

2. Communities of practice

The Teams view can also be used to create a hierarchy of Team Cards to create a community of practice. For example, you can create a community for Software Development by using Team Cards to create a hierarchy, as shown below. You will want to enable "Add Yourself" for Charts like this.

3. Self-managed teams

You can define a flat, self-managed team structure that does not have a reports-to leader. This can be done in a Chart using Team Cards in the reports-to position. You can then go to the Team Profile and designate a Team contact if you wish. Just click on the grey Team name header and select View Team Profile.

Then on the Members tab of the Team Profile, click the applicable "Make team contact" link.

4. Collaborators

Collaborators are associated with a Team (a Team Card or a Team Leader Role with one or more Roles reporting to it). This can be used for mentors, consultants, assistants, etc. Collaborators do not show up in the "left tree" column to the left of the org structure. You can rename the Collaborator label to be whatever is appropriate for this team, in this case "Consultants". One Team can have multiple Collaborators.

Sometimes you will want to designate Collaborators who are outside your organizations (aka "External" users). Where appropriate, you can also show Collaborators who are not actually invited to participate in your Jostle community.

In the example above, the Design Team is using an external Organizational Design Consultant to help it. They have added this person into Jostle using their publicly available title, email address, etc. and then intentionally not sent their Invite. This allows the Team to clarify who it is working with, without actually inviting that person to participate in their (confidential-to-their-organization) Jostle community.

5. Using Collaborators to show a management board

Sometimes a Team is managed by a team of people rather than a single supervisor. For example, your company might have a Management Board rather than a CEO. Using the Collaborators function is one way to depict such a structure. Here's how:

• Navigate to the spot where you'd like to post the 2 (or more) managers, above their direct reports.
• If there's 1 person already in that spot, hover your mouse on their card and select Remove > User.

• Now you have a blank, dark gray Vacant card at the level the 2 managers will be placed.  Hover there, and select Convert to Team Card:

• Give our new Team Card a name that represents this group.
• Use the People Picker in the bottom-right corner, to locate the first of the two managers.
• Drag the manager's name to the "Collaborators" spot to the left of your Team Card:

• Now find the second manager and add them just the same way, to the Collaborators section:

• Consider re-labeling "Collaborators" to something like "Leadership", "Managers" or "Directors" 

6. One team with two managers

Normally when a team has two managers this is a result of a matrixed organization and is best depicted that way (see section above). Another alternative is to move the managers to the Collaborative position, as describe in the preceding section. A third option is to replicate the Team so it appears twice, once under each of its two managers. Here's how:

• Navigate to the spot where you'd like to post the 2 (or more) managers, above their direct reports.
• Drag the additional manager(s) to the 'Add New' card.

In this example, we have added a new role for Greg as the other US Sales Director.

• Now we can recreate Treva's team under Greg. Use the People Picker to search and drag all members of the existing team into the new team.
• You will need to create new roles for these members as we don't want to move them from the existing team. These new roles can be the same as their role in the existing team. In this example, Frank will have the role 'US Order Desk' in both teams.

• Both teams now have the same members with the same roles.

• As a result, both teams will appear in the structure of your organization as well.