Understanding Departments & Groups in ConexED

Overview

Every service your faculty and staff deliver through ConexED — advising, tutoring, financial aid, career services, and more — is organized using two building blocks: Departments and Groups. Understanding how these two levels relate to each other, and where administrative access is granted, is the single most important concept for configuring ConexED correctly.

This article explains what Departments and Groups actually are in ConexED, how administrative access flows between them, and how to decide whether to organize your institution's service areas broadly or narrowly.

At a Glance

A Department is a service delivery container; a category. It is our way of organizing related services together for administrative and reporting purposes. It has no built-in relationship to your institution's academic departments or organizational chart. So, as you configure, keep in mind that "Department" does not have the same meaning as your usual association.

A Group is where the actual work happens - the interactions that staff are having with students and the data that comes from them during appointments, drop-ins, meetings, events, and documented phone, SMS, and email exchanges.

Almost all settings are configured per Group. Settings for calendar availability, scheduling buffers, queue settings, permissions for note-sharing, group data tracking checklists, confirmation email templates, appointment and follow-up forms, specific location settings, no-show alerts, allocated meeting times, and kiosk dashboard settings can be configured to meet the unique needs of each group. There are very few Department-level settings.
Department sizes will vary across the institution. Advising Departments often have multiple Groups, each one named for the Advising or Program Pathway. An Enrollment Services Department, may have an Admissions, Registration & Records Group, an International Student Services Group and a Dual Enrollment Group. Sometimes, a Department might have only one Group that shares the same name for example, a Mental Health Counseling Department with a Mental Health Counseling Services Group.

How It Works

Hierarchy

Departments contain Groups. Groups contain Users. User Roles and Placements determine Access.

Our permissions hierarchy follows a formula across the platform. Access is not only determined by role, but by a combination of Department placement, Group placement and feature assignment. So think of this formula as: Role + Group Placement + Feature Assignment = access.

A user with the assigned role of Department Director can be placed as a Department Category Admin and the access to each group within that department will apply automatically. However, when a user with the same role, Department Director, is not placed as a Category Admin, and instead, placed as a Group Admin within select Groups, then their access is focused on only those groups.

The Role Hierarchy

Role	Typical Scope
ConexED Administrator	Full platform access, all institutions/departments/groups
Institution Administrator	District/multi-college instances only
Department Director	Full access to all Groups within their assigned Department(s), automatically via Category Admin assignment or individually via Group Admin Assignment
Group Manager	Access limited to the specific Group(s) they are explicitly assigned to
Faculty/Staff	Day-to-day service delivery within their assigned Group(s)
Front Desk Agent	Front-facing support tasks within assigned Group(s)
Student Worker	Limited, supervised access within assigned Group(s)

Almost everything is configured at the Group level, not the Department level

By intentional design, almost all settings are configured per group. This ensures each group flexibility to use features that apply to their service area and their existing workflows individually. This means that each group will have decisions to make and configuration to complete. One exception is within Kiosk configuration. Though group’s configure their dashboard settings, the kiosk configuration itself, is completed by a user with a ConexED Administrator role, contains an inherited setting. A kiosk configuration of “Department mode," will automatically include every Group in that Department — including new ones added later.

Things to Know

A Department with many Groups means separate group configurations to implement. At first glance, this may seem complicated, but, group autonomy, flexible feature adoption and customization within settings and forms make the initial configuration efforts worth it.

Group Managers have access to maintain group settings, so all subsequent group maintenance is then delegated to them in multi-group departments, and less post-implementation decisions and changes require a large, collective buy-in.

Deleting a Department or Group will delete the data; should you wish to restructure, our team can move existing groups into different departments - you don't need to rebuild and start from scratch.

Use Cases

Scenario: One Manager, Several Related Service Areas.

A college's Academic Resource Center runs Math, Science, Academic Coaching, and Nursing tutoring under one manager, who has a job title of Academic Resource Center Coordinator. Since this person genuinely oversees all four areas, placing them as Department Director over one "Tutoring" Department is the appropriate structure — they get full administrative tools (reporting, structure management, and more) without needing to be manually added to each Group.

Scenario: Shared Service Area with an External Stakeholder concern.

Imagine in the scenario above, the Nursing tutoring group includes nursing faculty who report elsewhere academically. Imagine the Nursing program's leadership is concerned about the ARC manager's access to "their" staff.

Option 1: Change the Academic Resource Center Coordinator's role to Group Manager, and place this person in each of the other tutoring groups, except the Nursing Tutoring group. This will prevent access to the Nursing Tutoring Group. However, that downgrade limits the ARC coordinator's ability to collective see data and seamlessly run the center: there will be no cross-group reporting, no Scheduling Control Center access, no ability to create new Groups, no Shared Milestones, no Automations. In addition, an employee who does supervise the nursing faculty members, will need to be added as a Group Manager and will be expected to manage the administration of the entire Nursing Group.

Option 2: Best practice in such a situation, would be that the managing supervisor of the nursing faculty members who work as tutors, would be added as a Group Manager to the Nursing tutoring Group, to ensure oversight through collective access. The coordinator would keep the Director role to effectively manage the entire Academic Resource Center.

Option 3: If the real goal is to fully separate the Nursing group from the ARC manager's oversight, the other effective solution is a structural one — place Nursing in its own, separately administered group, within the Department that holds the other Academic Nursing Groups, and assign the Group manager who oversees those groups, to this new, separate, nursing tutoring group.

Decision Guide: Broad Departments vs. Narrow Departments

There isn't a universally "correct" way to structure your Departments, but the platform's behavior makes narrower Departments the more flexible default option for most institutions.

Structure your Departments around what areas continuously work collaboratively. Who shares information regularly? Who supports and collaborates with the same students routinely? Who shares a connected physical space to serve students?

Also, take into consideration who actually has administrative oversight of which service areas. Likely, your Department & Group configuration will be a combination of each type. Do not simply configure based on your campus org chart or around how your institution happens to name its offices.