We recently made a significant upgrade to our versatile org chart with the introductions of Hats.

First, let’s define some key terms.

• A hat is a particular role or occupation.  (Oxford Dictionary) 

• A post is a position of paid employment, a job. (Oxford Dictionary)  In envisage a post is a specific location on the org chart.

• An org chart is defined as: A diagram that shows the structure of an organization and the relationships and relative ranks of its parts and roles. (Wikipedia)

• A Member - a user with an envisage login. 

The Upgrade

A post consists of 3 parts:

1. A Hat - a description of what the person does, their functions, purpose and the result they are meant to achieve.

2. A Post - the specific location on the org chart.

3. A Member - the person assigned to the Post who carries out the duties and functions described in the hat.

Prior to this upgrade the hat was included in the post.

Now you can create a hat and assign the same hat to multiple posts. 

Why the change?

We noticed that our larger clients might have 300 sales people for example.

Let’s say the functions of the Sales People changed. That would require editing all 300 posts to change the functions.

Now, all you need to do is change the Hat and all 300 posts that are assigned the Hat of Sales Person will change. 

We also made this upgrade for other features coming soon, such as Policies.

While this may seem like a simple change, it required a restructure of the Org Chart database and 3,421 lines of code. Not an easy task, but we did it for you 😀.

Hat Merging

With the introduction of hats, a unique hat existed for each post on your org chart (prior to June 2020).

This may have created duplicate hats, for example—there will be a hat for every “Sales Person.”

If the functions and purposes of the "Sales Person" Hat are the same, then you only need one hat (which covers the same post, purpose and result for each person wearing this hat).

To save you the trouble of re-assigning the “Sales Person” Hats for all posts on your org chart, we created a simple merge feature. 

See How to Merge Hats

We’ve also updated our Org Chart Help Documentation—How to Create An Org Chart:

• Step 1 - Org Structure

• Step 2 - Creating Hats and Adding Posts to the Org Chart

• Step 3 - Adding Members to the Org Chart

As I’m sure you can tell, we’re committed to building an app that helps you plan, organize and monitor your entire business so that you can achieve and maintain hypergrowth.

And this Hats feature is another significant upgrade to help you do that 👍.

Comment and ask questions below or ask questions privately.

And remember envisage includes Statistics, Org Chart and OKRs and you can try for free on a no-risk 14-day trial. We’ll even help you set up all your existing statistics to make sure you succeed in getting your business onto Envisage. 

Comment and ask questions below or ask questions privately.