Are you using PeopleSoft Position Management to its full capacity?

In a recent demo, Jeremy Pelly, Product Strategist for Oracle, defined the key advantages for Position Management, bullet points for each type of Position Management, and updated features in HCM Image 29.

Position Management provides many key advantages for recruiting teams and organizational leadership, including:

• Creating and tracking position data and its history
• Maintaining incumbent data
• Less data entry in Job Data
• Budgeting for positions by department
• Maintaining headcount information
• Maintaining organization structures
• Ability to create positions with a status of Approved, Proposed, or Frozen

Position Management decisions revolve around how you view employees and their respective roles. Do you change a role to fit an employee’s unique skills and your immediate business needs, or do you expect employees to fit a set of long-term specific guidelines for roles?

PeopleSoft offers two options for people management—Full Position and Partial Position. Users have also added a third middle-of-the-road option—Partial Position Management Acting as Full Position Management. There are perks to each course, but there are also best practices across the board. You will need to decide what approach best fits your organization.

Full Position Management

This is the more common approach in higher education, government, and healthcare. Every seat is defined and counted for in advance, so leaders account for filled and unfilled positions. This gives a holistic view of the organization and the proposed organizations. With this approach, consistency is key, as attributes of the position do not change as individuals change in their positions.

Partial Position Management

This is the more common approach in retail positions and businesses with seasonal needs for contract workers. Some seats are defined and accounted for in advance, while others are not. This gives leaders a general view of the key positions in an organization but never a complete view. This approach is most useful in areas where great fluctuation in staff numbers is required.

Partial Position Management Acting as Full Position Management

This is the most popular and common approach. This is often seen in organizations that do not implement Position Management at the time of implementation. This approach leaves historical information in non-position format but creates positions and maintains positions moving forward. Users have flexibility in moving to position management little by little.

However, drawbacks are seen in the system due to not forcing Position Management values to be maintained. This can require more maintenance to ensure that everyone is adhering to the same standards.

Position Management Best Practices

Jeremy identified some best practices to consider when using Position Management. Some key takeaways to keep in mind are:

• Use of Full Position is always desirable.
• Most positions in the organization will be a 1:1 relationship between employee and position.
• Common positions that have a 1:many relationship are often lower positions in the organization, where all attributes of the position are the same for all individuals.
• Positions should be created at the time of budgeting.
• Positions that do not start or are not budgeted to start until later in the year should have an effective date reflecting the anticipated recruiting of the position.
• Recruiting should pull information for the job requisition from the position. Any modifications should be made to the position and allowed to flow to the job requisition.
• Empty positions should be inactivated if the intention is to not fill the position.
• Positions should exist for both employees and non-employees. This allows a complete view of the need of the organization.
• If Partial Position Management is desired, you should utilize as many positions as possible.

Jeremy also noted that it is not good practice to utilize the Position Override feature as part of standard operating procedures. This should be used only on rare occasion and for a limited amount of time.

Roadmap Items

There are several items on the roadmap for Position Management, including:

• Reports to Field functionality improvement
• Enabling Drop Zones for Position Management
• Ability to maintain more Job Data fields from Position Data
• Improve Update Incumbents Functionality—more options to include fields during Job Data update
• Analytics—Vacant Position Analytic

Additional features being considered for the future (not officially on the roadmap) include:

• Save as draft
• Increased Position Title field length
• Better clone functionality
• A guided approach to moving to Position Management

For a demo of Position Management, watch the video below.