User Interest Groups allow you to allocate Sites, Projects and the Annual Project Edit Status and Transitions to groups of users rather than individuals making the system easier to maintain. For example, the warden, assistant warden and the team of estate workers that are responsible for a group of sites could all belong to the same User Interest Group that lists their Sites.
For any group, the members will only be able to edit the sites that that group has been allocated. All other sites will be read only. Note that you can sort your sites on an Organisational Hierarchy making it easy to allocate blocks of sites to user interest groups. In the example above, the ‘North Region’ user interest group has the 3 sites belonging to the North Region hierarchy listed in the Associated Sites list on the right. If no sites are allocated to the Associated Sites list, then all users in that User Interest Group can edit all sites unless in they have been allocated a read-only Permission Set .
Group members may only edit projects that belong to their list of allocated Sites. If there are no projects allocated in the group then group members may edit all the projects that belong to their sites, otherwise they may only edit the project codes associated with the group. For example, a species or habitat specialist or a finance staff member may be allocated no sites but just a set of project codes. This will mean that they may only edit these particular project codes, but on all sites.
Annual Project Status process is described in the CMSi User Manual but on the Annual Project Edit Status tab you can allocate the different roles in this process to a User Interest Group. By default, none of the boxes are ticked and so all users can edit Planned and Allocated values regardless of the Annual Project status value. However, if you choose to restrict the editing of these values according to different roles within the organisation, then a typical setup could be as shown below. The first image, shows the settings for Site Managers in North Region whereby they cannot edit any Allocated resources when their projects are at any status but they can edit the Planned resources when those projects are at "Initial bid" stage. The second image shows the settings for the Head of Reserves who approves the initial bids. Their settings allow them to to edit both Planned and Allocated resources at both the "Initial Bid" and "For Approval" stages but once the projects are moved to "Allocated" then these figures are locked.
Annual Project Transitions allow you to control who can transfer the status from which status to another on the form Annual Projects Status in MyCMSi.
Note that if nothing is filled in on these tabs, everyone can plan or allocate resources regardless of their status so this is the default situation. This functionality is an optional extra.
In a simple organisational setup with only a couple of staff members who do everything, you do not have to use User Interest Groups. If you are allocated no sites, no projects and no permission sets, you will be able to edit everything.
A Permission set will override the User Interest Group so you can make certain fields, e.g. financial fields, read only even on Sites a user has been allocated here.
Advanced
Assigning Staff Resources to the Organisation Hierarchy
The Assign Staff to Organisation Hierarchy option on the Tools menu allows you to allocate staff resource codes to parts of the hierarchy in order to limit the list of resource codes available when planning on sites allocated to that region. So, for example, if some of your resource codes represent staff that only work within one region of your organisation, then you can link just those codes to that part of the hierarchy.
In the form, select a region from your hierarchy, then select one or more resource codes from the list of Available Staff and use the arrow buttons to move them into the Linked Staff list. Click on Apply to save these settings. These staff assignments are made for one financial year at a time, using the Year dropdown list. You can also copy the settings from one year to another by selecting a year to Copy From and a year to Copy To.
When Resources are planned in the Planning tab on an Annual Project form, the list of resource codes will be now filtered to just those assign to the region that the site lies in.
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