Organizational Unit

Organizational unit levels and organizational units
Create the organizational structure
Connect users to organizational units
Connect projects to organizational units
Notifications
Editing or deleting a unit

Organizational units help reproduce your organization’s structure in LogAlto. They can represent offices, regions, countries, departments, programs, partners, or any other level used by your organization.

For example:

Head Office
└─ West Africa Region
 ├─ Senegal Office
 ├─ Mali Office

The names and number of levels are configured for your LogAlto environment.

Organizational unit levels and organizational units

LogAlto distinguishes between:

An organizational unit level, which defines a level in the structure, such as Region or Country Office.
An organizational unit, which is an actual entry at that level, such as West Africa or Senegal Office.

Levels define how the hierarchy is organized. Each organizational unit belongs to a level and, except for the top level, is placed under a parent unit.

What are organizational units used for?

Depending on your configuration, organizational units can be used to:

Associate projects with the offices, programs, partners, or other units responsible for them.
Organize and filter projects, logframes, forms, documents, and reports.
Assign users and profiles to a specific part of the organization.
Limit the organizational units available to users.
Share forms or information with selected parts of the organization.
Select audiences for notifications.

An organizational unit does not grant access by itself. What a user can do still depends on their assigned profiles and permissions.

Create the organizational structure

Administrators should normally configure the structure in two stages.

1. Configure the organizational unit levels

From the administration settings, open Organizational Unit Levels. Create the levels required by your organization, from the highest to the lowest.

For each type, you can define its singular and plural names and its position in the hierarchy. Depending on your configuration, a level may also be enabled for project links.

Example:

Level 1: Organization
Level 2: Region
Level 3: Country Office

2. Add the organizational units

Open Organizational Units and add the actual units to the hierarchy.

To add a new unit, click the + icon next to Organizational Unit. This will create a unit at the top level of the hierarchy.

To add units under an existing unit, click the + icon next to the corresponding level in the hierarchy.

A child unit must be placed below a unit from a higher level. For example, a Country Office can be placed under a Region.

Connect users to organizational units

Users can be associated with organizational units through their profiles.

In Advanced Settings, enabling Secured organizational units restricts the organizational-unit selectors based on the user’s profile. A user assigned to an organizational unit can view and select that unit and any of its child units. If the user is not assigned to any applicable organizational unit, the selector may be empty.

This restriction works together with regular permissions. For example, access to the Senegal Office does not automatically give the user permission to create or edit projects there; the user’s profile must also allow those actions.

Connect projects to organizational units

When creating or editing a project, users select the relevant organizational unit or units. The available fields depend on the organizational-unit roles configured for projects.

For example, a project could have:

One mandatory Responsible Office.
Several optional Implementing Partners.

These links make it possible to filter projects, apply profile-based access rules, and report by organizational structure.

Notifications

An organizational unit can be made available as an audience for supported notifications. Administrators can disable this option for units that should not be selectable as notification audiences.

Editing or deleting a unit

Administrators with the appropriate permission can rename a unit, change its code, or update certain settings.

An organizational unit cannot be deleted while it is still referenced elsewhere in LogAlto. Remove or reassign its related projects, profiles, forms, documents, or other records before trying again.

Good practices

Design the hierarchy before creating the units.
Use names that users will immediately recognize.
Avoid unnecessary levels.
Keep codes unique and consistent.
Review profile assignments whenever the structure changes.
Test the structure with a non-administrator account before rolling it out.