Job Roles and Resource Management

[abartimmo1]

At the end of last year (2022), we updated our Job Roles to align with each employee's title and hierarchy within their department (i.e., Group Director, Director, Associate Director, Senior Manager, Manager, Coordinator). Each employee's new (title-aligned) Job role was set up as their Primary Job Role.

We also created Job Roles that align with each discipline (i.e., Advertising Operations, Analytics, and Performance, Client Engagement, Content Marketing, Copy, Visual Design, etc.); these Job Roles were set up as each user's "Other" (second) Job Role. This was done so our resource managers could resource the entire discipline, no matter the user's primary(title-aligned) Job role.

I am looking for some advice and thoughts on the following:

1. Was this the best way to set up the Job Roles? 
2. Could the discipline "other" Job Role per user be set up as a team instead?
3. Has anyone else done a similar setup?

[RandyRoberts]

I set up our roles with assignments in mind, since that's the primary purpose. Our roles are defined as, "What does that person do?" regardless of title. Skill set is also high on the definition list.

Can a Senior Account Manager do everything an Account Manager does? In our case, yes. Do the people responsible for assigning tasks know the difference? Probably not. Do you need to separate Senior hours from Junior hours? We do not. 

Don't make the mistake of confusing "title" with "role" as they are very different in most instances.

As far as teams go, we set up our teams as units of people that work together on a project/portfolio/client/etc. No need to silo roles into teams as they are already siloed by role. If I have Art Director as a role, why do I need a team for that?

This approach has worked for me for years in a group of 9 agencies, with multiple business units each, and 1,000+ users. YMMV.

TIP: if this solved your problem, I invite you to consider marking it as a Correct Answer to help others who might also find it of use.

[Lyndsy-Denk]

"Don't make the mistake of confusing "title" with "role" as they are very different in most instances."

And communicate that distinction with your users. It sounds like @abartimmo1 is trying to account for that misconception by allowing some of it to be part of the job role definitions. I think I dig it.

[Lyndsy-Denk]

Perhaps this topic is more discussion than question, because I, too, am curious to hear approaches to defining job roles. It's something I tried to tackle earlier in my admin stint, but definitely made some mistakes.

[RandyRoberts]

Another thing to consider is suggested roles on template tasks. For instance a task for initial logo designs could be assigned to the role of Designer, Art Director, Creative Director, Associate Art Director, Freelance Artist, Artist, Production Artist, it could go on and on. In our instance, we have "Creative | Art Direction", "Creative | Desktop Design", Creative | Presentation Design". It's pretty clear this should go to a Desktop Designer to be approved by an Art Director, or to a Director to be delegated to a Designer.

Notice how these are "Direction", not "Director" and "Design", not "Designer"? Job role is what you do, while title is what you are.

[abartimmo1]

I am creating this topic as a discussion.  Thank you for the feedback. 

• The main reason we want the Job Role aligned closer to the user's title is to track Revenue and Actuals (burn). We have a rate card that has multiple layers of hierarchy, and we need to know what the Jr Designer did as well as the Sr. Designer. Both users have different rates.
• Rates are associated with Companies in our instance - (Company Bill Rates = Client rate card)
• So at the task level, we have Cost Type (User Hourly) and Revenue Type (Role Hoursly). This allows us to see Actual Revenue.
• Is there a different setting we can use at the Task Level that will allow us to reduce the number of Job Roles we have in our instance but still account for Company Bill Rates per user? 

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi @abartimmo1,

We've been focused on Burn Reports (of Approved, Forecast, and Actuals) for the last several months. There are loads of details in our How to Monitor and Manage MARGINS post, which I invite you to review and comment upon. I look forward to chatting there further in due course!

Regards,

Doug