Overview

TeamOhana's Scenarios feature enables users to build a hiring plan from the bottom up. The benefits of this 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 then select the "new plan" scenario template. 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," you will be taken to a blank canvas to build a hiring plan 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.

From there, you'll start to build your plan by clicking the "+Add headcount" button and updating each row the same way you would a spreadsheet. Each time you click that button, a new role will appear with the Draft status, and the draft's department will autofill to the user's own department. Every modification you make to that row, regardless of what field it's in, will be captured on the Changes tab.

You can also add headcount by duplicating headcount you've created. 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.

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 (Headcount, FY cost, or Annual cost), 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 of your plan 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 and will be added to the next fiscal year's hiring plan.

Creating a scenario differs from adding one-off headcount 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 workflow will continue to be used by hiring managers, as the scale of headcount that they have access to is much smaller.

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.