ChartHop terminology
ChartHop uses a common terminology to represent your organization and take actions within ChartHop itself. Below is a list of key terms that you'll need to understand.
Users are authorized individuals who can access ChartHop. A user often corresponds to a person (see below) on the org chart, but not always. For example, you might want to invite an external consultant to your ChartHop instance. Although it's rare, users can have access to multiple instances simultaneously.
All access to ChartHop is tied to a user, even API-level access. For example, if you are building an API-based integration with ChartHop, an app user will be created in ChartHop that corresponds to the level of access required by the integration.
A person is a current, future, or former member of an organization.
A job is a specific function within your ChartHop org chart that has a particular level, salary, and hierarchical position associated with it. There can only be at most one person in a given job at a time. If someone leaves a job, the role is considered to be an open job.
Jobs can have exactly one direct manager and one indirect manager. An indirect manager is represented by a dotted line.
In most cases, there will always be exactly one head job in the organization. If your org has co-CEOs, email our support team (support@charthop.com) so that we can enable it for you.
A group is a method of categorization that allows jobs to be segmented by a variety of important groupings. Jobs can belong to multiple groups, such as departments, teams, locations, and bands. For example you can create multiple overlapping teams to represent different cross-functional groups, sales territories, or areas of responsibility.
Any change that is made to a job is recorded in your organizational history. There are several types of changes listed below.
- Create - a job is created.
- Update - a change is made to a job, such as new manager, compensation, title, or other fields.
- Data - data is collected, such as a form being filled out.
- Delete - a job is removed from the org chart.
- Hire - a person is hired into a job.
- Depart - a person leaves the organization; departures can either be voluntary or involuntary.
- Move - a person moves from one job into another open job, such as an internal transfer.
At its core, ChartHop is a record of changes. You can hop to any moment in time and ChartHop will replay the changes for exactly that moment in organizational history, and you can always propose a new set of changes. Those with appropriate access can edit the history of changes, such as altering a start date or even cancelling a change retroactively.
A scenario is a proposal for a set of changes to the organization. For example, a hiring plan, or a proposal for a reorganization, is a scenario. Scenarios can be shared privately, and while anyone can create a scenario, a scenario is not live until it is "merged" by an approved user into the primary org chart.
Users with the right permissions can create any number of custom fields with different datatypes that can help you gather information about your organization. You can include these fields in forms such as an employee survey or another custom form. You can control access to the data collected by setting data sensitivity rules. Data collected can be used in reports.
You can also create forms that collect data. You can build a form with any number of custom fields that you create. Use forms to collect self-reported data, such as performance review, custom user profiles, or happiness surveys.
