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Guidance for Organisations Reconfiguring - A practical guide to help you plan
We understand that the NHS is going through widespread organisational changes at the moment. These changes, of course, have much wider impact than the KSF and e-KSF. However, the KSF
is one of the points of continuity for staff during change – whatever else goes on around them,
they should still have a post outline, and someone (their reviewer) to talk to about their progress
and development.
You may want to think about merging organisational data on e-KSF, to reflect the realities of the
new NHS organisation. Note that this isn’t essential to do on day one, as e-KSF can still be used
effectively with staff allocated to their “old” organisations. Note also that if you’re using ESR in
England or Wales from around October 06, the list and structure of organisations on e-KSF will
have to reflect the ESR list and structure.
There is usually no charge for consolidating data in this way (provided you’re able to follow our
standard process and we can complete everything via email). However, there is a fair amount of
work to do locally in this process, so we recommend you do consider the options carefully before
embarking on this.
When considering how to merge this information you have you have 3 choices:
1) Select the data from one of your organisations to use as the “master” list, and use this in
the new organisation (data from other organisations in your group would be deleted)
2) Tell us, in an Excel spreadsheet, what data you’d like to appear in your new organisation
3) Ask us to “start from scratch” with your new organisation, with an empty list for you to
complete on-line once the data merging exercise is complete.
If you do want to go ahead with the merger of organisational data (moving data from two, or
more, organisations on e-KSF into a single e-KSF organisation), then there are a range of things
to think about:
Authorisation
Before starting this process, we’ll need an email or printed confirmation from a representative of
every organisation that’s part of the data merge operation. This will normally be the KSF lead or
senior HR representative, and ensures that every organisation understands the purpose of the
exercise, and what they need to do locally to ensure success.
Deciding on which organisation-specific data to select
When using e-KSF, the administrator from each organisation has the opportunity to set up organisation level data. This may be different for each organisation so will require consolidation.
Organisation-specific data to consider here are:
Departmental Structure: You can view the existing departmental structure by clicking on the link "Manage Trust Departmental Structure" on your eKSF admin home page. This will need to be updated to reflect the new departmental structure which means you may need to wait for the organisation itself to “settle down” before doing this.
To make this easier you can to provide us with a spreadsheet of which staff should be related to which department or directorate, and we can make the changes for you.
If you are (in England and Wales and have ESR already or are getting ESR in the near future you may want to consider removing the departmental structure and allowing the ESR / e-KSF link to populate this information for you.
Staff Groups Data: You can view the existing Staff Group data by clicking on the link "Manage Staff Classification" on your eKSF admin home page. The same comments
apply here, as for the departmental structure.
Again ESR (in England and Wales) also stores staff group data, so you may decide not to do anything with the staff group data on e-KSF yet, and rather rely on ESR to provide this.
Organisational Objectives: Each organisation can add a page of “objectives” to e-KSF, via the e-KSF admin page and the "View/edit Organisational Objectives" link. You’ll need
to update this information based on the new Organisation Objectives.
Learning & Development Activities: You can set up a list of standard learning and development activities on e-KSF, which are the accessible from the PDP page. By
default, we’ll merge the list of activities and provide all the data from your “old”
organisations, in a single list on your “new” organisation. This is the safest approach,
because it means that any existing links to activities in PDPs will be retained. If you have not been using this functionality then a new list of activities can be set up in the new organization.
Budget Codes for PDPs: The e-KSF administrator for each organisation may have set up a list of budget codes, which can then be used on the e-KSF PDP page to identify the
source of any funding for activities. We need you to tell us whether to consolidate the
existing list of codes into one new, long, list, or whether to start with a blank list or any
other list that you give us. If you want to give us a new list or start with a blank list, note
that you won’t be able to run reports on any existing use of this data in existing PDPs.
Consolidating Post Outline Data
You may find that each organisation in your group has created a different set of post outlines on
e-KSF, which may overlap or duplicate each other. For example, you might have 2 different
outlines for “Healthcare Support Worker”. By default, we’ll move all outlines into your new merged
e-KSF organisation, so you’ll then need to work through your local post outline library, and
outlines submitted for approval, to decide which ones to keep. Of course, reconfiguration is a
great opportunity to design entirely new roles!
Merging Staff Specific Data
Usually, merging of staff data (moving staff from the “old” organisations to the new one) is the
most straightforward step, but also the time-consuming one for us. We need to take the lists of
users, roles and relationships and associate them all with the new organisation.
Specifically:
We need to make sure that any unique identifiers (e.g. payroll numbers) are unique in the new organisation. If the previous organisations have used similar, but unconnected,
payroll or HR systems this can cause problems. For example, you may have John Smith
in organisation A with payroll number 12345, and Jane Doe in organisation B, also with
payroll number 12345. This is no problem when the organisations are separate, but is not
possible in a single organisation. If there are lots of duplicates, we’ll ask you whether you
want to provide us with a completely new set of identifiers. If there are only a few
duplicates then you may want to add prefixes or suffixes to the identifiers to make them
unique again (e.g. A-12345 and B-12345)
By default, we’ll maintain any staff/manager and reviewer/reviewee relationships –
i.e. if Jane managed John in the old organisation, we’ll assume that Jane still manages
John in the new organisation. If you want to change this, you’ll need to provide lists of
new relationships in a spreadsheet. (note that we can only record reviewer/reviewee
relationships for reveiwees who already have post outlines assigned)
If email addresses are going to change in bulk, then let us know. Otherwise, we’ll
maintain the old email address data. (users can change this themselves via the “edit
personal details” screen. By default we’ll also maintain the assignment of post outlines – if John was assigned
a post outline in the old organisation, he’ll have the same outline in the new organisation Even if you delete the outline from the local library. If staff need to be assigned new
outlines, then the managers of each of the staff need to do this via the e-KSF manager
screens.
We’ll also assume that roles are maintained – for example, if a e-KSF user was a
manager in the old organisation, they will retain manager rights in the new organisation. If
you need to change this, you can do so through the e-KSF admin pages.
Additional Questions:
Do you want all e-KSF administrators of the “old” organisations to retain their administration rights in the new organisation?
Do you have a consistent view on the use of the “self registration” options and “complete
on paper” options on e-KSF?
Do you have a consistent view on any post outline sharing that’s in place? (Where an
organisation agrees to share all it’s post outlines with another organisation)
If you’ve associated post outlines with departments or staff groups, then we’ll need to talk
about how these get associated with the department and staff lists in the “new”
organisation
Do you have any technical data links to other local HR, payroll or learning systems? If so, we’ll need detailed discussions about what you’d like to do with these.
The whole process of merging data is fairly straightforward, but does take time and effort, both
from the e-KSF team, and yourselves. We will always check with you before making any changes
or deletions, and we’ll always confirm with after we make changes to data, so you’ll always know
where we are against your plans and there are no surprises.
If you decide that you want to kick off this process, please contact us at support@e-ksf.org with the subject line “merging data” and we’ll get back to you with further details and actions You can also contact your local e-KSF Account Manager to discuss any additional help that you may require with this activity.
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