TeamOhana's Scenarios feature enables users to make bulk changes to the hiring plan. The benefits of this new feature include:

Scenarios should be used by division / department leaders, or Finance users who need to make multiple changes to the hiring plan at once, and want to see how those changes impact the entire hiring plan and headcount budget.

Navigate to the Scenarios tab of your main navigation bar, then click the orange "Create" button in the top right corner of the page.

You will input a Scenario name, and the template type "Modify plan" will be selected by default. The Departments that are available to select will depend on your permissions (ie Admins or Finance users will be able to select all departments, while department heads will only have access to their own departments.) Finally, a free-text field enables you to input a description of the scenario.

When you click "Create," the scenario that is created takes a snapshot of the existing hiring plan, including draft and in-approval headcount, for all of the departments that you've selected on the previous page.

Let's start by identifying each component of your scenario.

Before you get started, make sure the columns you want to see are visible and in the right order by clicking the Manage columns button.

Then, click through your filters to ensure that every headcount you need to review, whether it's approved, in approval, or a draft, appears on your scenario.

From there, you can make changes to the headcount directly from this table. It functions almost exactly like a spreadsheet - so much so that you can even navigate it and make updates using only your keyboard. Any modifications you make, regardless of what field they are in, will be captured on the Changes tab.

Note that hired headcount will be grayed out because no further modifications can be made to them, but they are included in the scenario to provide additional context to budget impact.

As you make changes, the financial impact to your hiring plan will be tracked on the Forecast and Variance tiles. Note that this feature is only accessible to users who have permission to view Budgets & Forecast.

If you would like to add a new headcount to the hiring plan, you can do so by clicking the "+ Add headcount" button. A new role will appear with the Draft status, and the draft's department will autofill to the user's own department.

You can also add headcount by duplicating existing headcount. This will also create a draft, but the key details of the existing headcount will be autofilled.

As you're making changes and adding new headcount, you can leave comments on individual headcount by clicking the speech bubble to the left of the headcount ID. You can @mention other users, and these comments will all be collected on the scenario-wide Comments and Mentions panel you can access via the speech bubble button in the top right corner of the screen.

As you make updates to your scenario, you can toggle back and forth between the list view and the org view to see visually how the changes will impact your organizational hierarchy.

All drafts will be marked with the "draft" status.

You can invite other people to work with you on your scenario by clicking the Collaborators button in the top right corner. When you invite a collaborator, you will be asked to assign them an access level:

Once collaborators are added to your scenario, you'll have the options to transfer ownership of the scenario to them or remove their access.

Before you send your scenario for approval, you can review all of the changes that were made in the Changes tab. Updates are separated into two sections: Added and Modified.

The specific changes made to modified headcount will be called out with an orange highlight, and hovering over the cell will show you exactly what the modification was.

If you click on any of the colored tiles at the top of the page (Budget, Forecast, or Variance), a change log will open on the right side of the screen which breaks down the modifications line by line to show you the exact impact on either a fiscal year or annualized basis.

Once all changes have been reviewed, the scenario can be sent for approval via the orange button in the top right corner.

Scenario approvers will be notified over email that there is an in-approval scenario requiring their review. They can click into the scenario from the notification email, or navigate to their Scenarios landing page and click the "In progress" tab.

Once they've reviewed the modifications to the scenario, they'll approve it by clicking the green Approve button on the top of the page.

Note: if a scenario is denied, it will no longer be editable.

Once a scenario is approved, there is one final step before it's incorporated into the hiring plan: it must be merged.

In some cases, a different user might merge the scenario than the user who approved it. Users may also want time to review all approved scenarios before they start merging anything into the hiring plan.

Scenario mergers will be notified over email that there is an approved scenario needing to be merged. They can click into the scenario from the notification email, or navigate to their Scenarios landing page and click the "In Progress" tab. Approved scenarios will have a green "Approved" status tag.

Mergers will have an orange Merge button on the top panel of the Scenario's page.

Once a scenario is merged, it will be listed under the "Merged" tab of the Scenarios landing page.

Modifying a scenario differs from adding one-off headcount requests or submitting change requests in a number of ways.

First, Scenarios will likely be leveraged mostly by department leaders and Finance users - in other words, users who have access to a large number of headcount. The headcount request and change request workflows will continue to be used by hiring managers, as the scale of headcount that they have access to is much smaller.

Scenarios allow changes to be made in bulk and in the context of the rest of the hiring plan. Changes to individual headcount must be made one at a time.

Scenarios were built for collaboration, so the approval process is simplistic: most cross-functional user activity will occur in the scenario before it's submitted for approval. There is no concept of collaboration for one-off requests, so the approval chain has multiple users who are included in the absence of collaboration pre-submission.

Hiring managers will continue to have access to these existing workflows, but now department heads and finance users have the additional ability to make changes to the hiring plan on a much larger scale.