People Accelerator

A solution accelerator for “people” workloads, built on Power Platform

Organizations all over the world across all industries are building apps and implementing solutions with their people at the center. HSO sees time after time that many of the workloads built on Microsoft’s Cloud Application Platform have a significant workforce component requiring the app to know where the organization operates, in which facilities, who works here, who they are, what they’re doing, and so on.

We created our People Accelerator solution to establish a single source of truth for workforce data and give your application development a jump-start when it comes to developing solutions that impact your people. The accelerator provides a highly customizable, integrated set of reusable components that allow Power Platform developers to more rapidly create solutions for managing:

  • Geo-location data and facilities
  • Organizational structure, personnel, and human resources
  • Personnel status, commitments, and monitoring burnout
  • Recruiting and onboarding
  • Competencies and skills
  • Training curricula, course registrations, and student achievement
  • Ad hoc work groups, such as project teams, exercises, or deployments (industry configurable)
  • Equipment and asset inventory

Features

Location and Facilities

Define a data set of locations and facilities to which other functions can be tied. Most large organizations divide the world’s geography in ways that make sense to their mission and operations. The fl exibility of the solution allows for location data to conform to the way your users see the world:

  • Regions are a continent or custom category, such as Americas, EMEA, or CENTCOM
  • Countries are self-explanatory but fl exible enough to define “England” or “Puerto Rico” as you need
  • Territories allow for logical groupings within countries, say by State, Province, or County
  • Localities define jurisdictions, such as towns and cities within a territory
  • Locations are specific places, such as a campus, building, or other facility you manage
  • Location Types group your data the way you want, for example, to def ne offices, clinics, or warehouses.
  • Location data is then tied to other organizational data, which makes it easy to answer questions like: How many people do I have working in this facility where there’s just been a COVID outbreak? Who do we need to evacuate from this location due to a weather event? Are we over or under capacity here, and what’s that misallocation of resources costing us?

Organization and Personnel

Achieve a “single source of truth” for your organizational and personnel data, secure it, and then reuse it in whole or in part across all your applications. Most organizations reuse this data across hundreds or thousands of apps, spreadsheets, and other databases.

The Accelerator brings it all together:

  • Organizational Units nest within each other to produce hierarchies that drive business logic
  • Org Unit Types allow you to determine, for example, who’s at HQ and who’s in the fi eld
  • Job Positions tell you what’s fi lled, what’s vacant, and everything you need about any given role
  • Personnel Files create a single, securable source of truth for HR data about an individual
  • Assignment History tracks assignments to duty or work experience over time

The accelerator provides specifi c functionality useful to military, security, and other larger organizations with more
hierarchical structures

  • Ranks allow individuals to be tied to organization-specifi c levels of promotion
  • Grades facilitate apples to apples comparison across organizations, for example, in establishing equivalency
    between a Captain in one organization and a Lieutenant in another
  • Specialties tie individuals back to the disciplines in which they are trained or focused

Personnel Status

Keeping track of an entire workforce is a huge challenge, particularly when its members are moving between assignments, in and out of training, located across the country or around the globe, and—importantly—attending to their own personal, family, and medical needs. The accelerator’s “Personnel Status” capability consolidates data from across the solution into an “all up” availability that enables organizations to:

  • Monitor and report on potential employee burnout over time
  • Commit only available people to upcoming assignments, and to deconfl ict when necessary
  • Route approvals for various tasking and leave based on organizational hierarchy

Recruiting and Onboarding

Related but separate processes of recruiting and hiring, onboarding, and transitioning new joiners to HR management is often cumbersome. Recruiting Management Systems (RMS) are often not integrated with HR systems, and onboarding is handled via a paper checklist.

The Accelerator brings all these pieces together so data input in the system at candidate sourcing follows that candidate through the entire hiring process, then it is seamlessly merged into the new employee’s personnel record:

  • Job Positions represent roles to be filled within the organization, sourced directly from HR so that recruiters know they’re filling empty roles that HR is tracking on their end
  • Job Postings are specific advertisements to fill specific positions, which are useful given that a job position may have multiple postings over its lifespan as people come and go
  • Recruiting Events allow recruiters to tag candidates against events or recruit outreach campaigns, so that over time you can evaluate the efficacy of different hiring forums
  • Candidates are named individuals seeking placement in the organization; they may be applying for one or more roles
  • Job Applications represent a single application made by a single candidate to a single job posting for a single job position, or they might represent a general “I want to work here” inquiry • Interviews are scheduled between the interviewer and a candidate; feedback and other notes are tracked here for recruiters to use post-interview
  • Offers are made to candidates, referenced back to their application and the job posting + position to which they applied

The accelerator allows business rules to be defined, for example:

  • Generate a Personnel File and fill a Job Position on acceptance of an offer
  • Type of position for which a person is hired triggers a certain onboarding path
  • Equipment is ordered or issued, transportation arrangements made, and pre-assignment medical examinations are automatically scheduled when an off er is accepted or a person starts
People working together at a table in an office

Create a single source of truth

We created our People Accelerator solution to establish a single source of truth for workforce data and give your application development a jump-start when it comes to developing solutions that impact your people.

Competencies and Skills Bank

Competencies, Skills, Certifi cations, Qualifi cations. Regardless of what you call them, the Accelerator allows organizations to establish their own competency set, to diff erentiate between (for example) skills that one might have acquired through experience versus certifications earned through a specific process.

This capability helps match the right people to the task in scenarios such as:

  • Defining requirements for a job or assignment so the accelerator finds your best matches
  • Managing re-certification timelines so that you comply with external requirements
  • Quickly identifying skills you didn’t know your people had when emergencies arise

Training

Managing training curricula, scheduling courses, registering students, and tracking student progress can be consuming, as well as Integrating these activities with other personnel management functions. The accelerator lets you manage:

  • Disciplines or subjects like “Accounting” or “Criminal Procedure” or your preference
  • Courses, or repeatable collections of content taught together, think “Criminal Procedure 101”
  • Course Off erings represent a one-time teaching of the course into which students may enroll
  • Students, or the enrollment of a single person in a course (to be approved, rejected, or waitlisted) and their status (e.g., pass or fail)

This becomes a powerful app capability from which we’ve seen many scenarios:

  • Students or employees take charge of their own course enrollments via an internal catalog
  • Thresholds are set for minimum and maximum student enrollment to automate planning
  • When mishaps occur, regulated or sensitive organizations such as medical, police, or military can trace which students were enrolled in a course at a certain time—and which version of an always evolving lesson they were taught

Work Groups

Different sectors refer to their ad hoc work groups diff erently. Private companies often pull employees together into “project teams”. Military, public safety, and even humanitarian organizations run exercises, deployments, missions, and task forces. COVID called for hospitals to constitute special wards and makeshift teams.

The Accelerator allows organizations to bring together groups of personnel to accomplish specifi c tasks or missions:

  • Work Groups are created to bring people from throughout the organization together from a start date to an end date so that you know who is doing what, and why
  • Work Group Roles represent specifi c assignments within a Work Group; whatever makes sense in your context
    like “Project Manager” or “Supply Clerk” or “Lead Instructor”
  • Work Group Role Requirements allow you to specify competency, training, and more for each role so the Accelerator can suggest matches based on employee profile and availability
  • Work Group Milestones provide a timeline of events or a series of objectives to be accomplished while the Work Group is active
  • Work Group Templates allow managers and planners to template typical scenarios or combinations of Work Groups, roles, role requirements, and milestones so you don’t have to create everything from scratch each time

Equipment and Inventory

The “kitbag” is a major cost to control but an essential part of employee success. The Accelerator integrates asset
management with employee readiness, which enables tying kit requirements to specifi c job roles so gear can be issued
on assignment and collected on departure and inventory levels can be matched to workforce size.

Contact us

Interested in a solution accelerator for “people” workloads, built on Power Platform?

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