How are PARs handled?

[Devilsigh]

As the title says, I had a question about how Personnel Action Requests are handled. Are they just lumped into the system where a defined group receives all of them? If so, my suggestion would be to add an option where a PAR is only seen by relevant personnel, such as PARs for squad members going to their squad leader, etc. But of course allowing for flexibility, since some of my PARs will require a level of approval far above someone's immediate first-line supervisor. 

I feel like providing a description of how most of PERSCOM's functions actually work would be helpful. Most of us are just figuring this out as we go. I feel like we may not even understand the true scope and power of PERSCOM 2.0, so a little guidance would be helpful. Basically, what can it actually do? Type of thing.

[Devilsigh]

?

[Jon Erickson]

Correct, they all appear in the system in one spot. The only permissions that can be set are who can submit them. Optionally, I can add a permission for who can manage them as well. But for the time being, creating the ability for PARs to go to certain places, squad leaders etc, is a little specific. Until a organizational chart can be built into the back end to help manage chain of command, it’ll be hard to implement that correctly. But I will add the option to choose who can manage them.

 

[NC1787]

Would it be to hard to only allow a soldier's supervisor the ability to approve/deny certain PARs?  Provided a soldier's supervisor is set, I cannot imagine it would be to hard.  

A dynamic Chain of Command system would probably be pretty difficult to get set up, but what if you could have basic settings during the creation of the PAR to select who gets notified and who the certain PAR shows up for in the PAR admin list for.

I envision the system working something like this:

During PAR form setup you can select one of a few handling options....Who gets to view/handle the PAR in the PAR admin list....select either the soldier's supervisor, a certain Administrative Unit or a certain Administrative Position or just anyone who has permissions to manage them (as it is now).

Some items like Leave requests and such could be handled by a Soldier's supervisor.  This allows the Soldier's supervisor to be informed of some things with their direct reports.

Other things like assignment change requests could be handled by one of a few personnel clerks....either in a Admin Unit or Admin Position.

A retirement request could be set to be handled by a separate group of personnel clerks. 

All of this being decided by a few drop downs in on the PAR form creation.

A unit would be able to create these Administrative Units and Positions as they needed and then configure the PAR request forms to send forms to those certain groups.  Having the option to select which group you want to handle the PAR would be very helpful for large communities.  A large community may have many people who need to handle PARs but not all PARS.  Having to sort through a list to see if any or which one applies to you may prove to be difficult.

I would imagine it would be easier to implement something like that which is based off certain groups or one person(direct supervisor) which you already have built in and can probably call easier instead of a full fledged CoC system.

[NC1787]

@Jon Erickson  Is the above something that could be done?  I think it would be a much quicker way to improve the PAR system and would avoid you having to build out a fully dynamic CoC system.  All of the items I referenced to be called during PAR form creation should be existing DB info to pull from.....IE: Soldier's Supervisor, Users with a certain Admin Unit, Users with a certain Admin position.

[Arthur Cantu]

5 hours ago, NC1787 said:

@Jon Erickson  Is the above something that could be done?  I think it would be a much quicker way to improve the PAR system and would avoid you having to build out a fully dynamic CoC system.  All of the items I referenced to be called during PAR form creation should be existing DB info to pull from.....IE: Soldier's Supervisor, Users with a certain Admin Unit, Users with a certain Admin position.

I can't give specifics at this time, but I do know @Jon Erickson is currently working on implementing a system to handle this suggestion. 

[Jon Erickson]

The next update will include the ability to assign a specific group that can handle a specific form submission. At this time and after much discussion, there will not be away to assign a specific soldier to manage a form, such as a supervisor. This is because this goes against IPBs native ability to handle permissions. IPB is built on group based permissions, not member based permissions and thus has no functionality to handle such requests. So for your case, if you want “Personnel Clerks” to handle a specific form, you just create a forum group for them and then you will be able to assign them to the form you wish. Hope this makes sense!

[NC1787]

Thank you for the replies.  I look forward to seeing the update.