What is a “secondary” supply hierarchy?
Some organisations find that traditional reporting line structures are not conducive to identifying groups of common skills and capabilities.
In response, many organisations have started to introduce a different type of supply structure aligned by similar skillsets, typically known as chapters. This allows for:
Appropriate training, resourcing and coaching to the specific skills of the chapter to enable personal growth and sharing of latest technology and practices knowledge
Enable the right talent to be easily moved to the right work at the right time
This new type of supply structure can be equivalent to someone’s reporting line but is not always the case. This is where TeamForm can help you with representing this secondary supply type hierarchy for visibility and workforce planning purposes. One reason an enterprise’s reporting line can be different from their skill or capability grouping is when company policy requires that a line manager in the same region as their direct report, even if this results in teams comprising a mix of skills or capabilities.
What to consider when setting up your secondary supply hierarchy in TeamForm
Use the tree diagram below to hep you think through what is the best way to represent your supply hierarch in TeamForm. This is particularly important because it will have a downstream impact to how you complete workforce planning in TeamForm (if you choose to do so) as it will dictate:
How demand leaders raise their demand request
Which persona has the right of authority to change people’s demand team allocations
How you run your workforce planning cycle so that data can be aggregated up in the UI for ease of review on where demand requests are coming in.
Editable version: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVKV7--VY=/
Other key configuration design decisions to consider relating to supply structures
Key Design Decisions | Implications | Walk 🚶 | Run 🏃 | Fly 🚀 |
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If you have separate supply hierarchies, who and how will this secondary hierarchy be managed in TeamForm? | If TeamForm becomes the single source of truth for a second hierarchy, there needs to be a process behind it to support the data maintenance of it, otherwise the data will become redundant very quickly, stopping you from being able to use the data in any processes or reporting. |
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Do you have a need to understand who has what skills or capability within the organisation? If so, do you an enterprise skills or capability list that you would like to bring into TeamForm? | Skills/capabilities can become powerful during workforce planning as we can ask requestors to provide specific information on what skillsets they are after to then help supply leaders make more accurate decisions on allocating the right person with the right skillsets to do the work. With this data in TeamForm, we can also help provide an enterprise view of what skillsets are available and the spread of these skillsets against strategy and/or work which will ultimately help inform decisions on future workforce structure. |
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Do you wish to see who is the owner of each supply team? | All line management hierarchy in HR systems is built in a way that the leader is always one level above their direct reports. When this data gets brought into TeamForm, the leader will not sit inside the supply team with their direct reports but rather at the direct members level, making it difficult to know which leader owns which team. Therefore by adding a team lead tag against each supply team, it makes it easier for people to know and see who the team lead is without having to alter the source HR system hierarchy data just to allow team lead to sit inside the team they own. |
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