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Human Resources case management

Categories: HR, Integration

Context​

A client required an HR solution that would integrate with their current employee record system to deal with cases from grievance, disciplinary, absence, whistleblowing and probation.

Problem​

The client was happy with their current HR Employee Record System and wanted a system to work alongside to give functional support for HR cases, currently being supported by Microsoft products (Word/Excel). Each HR case type had its own unique workflow, access requirements and sensitivity depending on the staff levels the case involved.

Non Functional​

HR cases within an organisation tend to be low volume but high in process and sensitive in restriction of data.

Solution​

QuickCase, with its background in legal case handling, has a rich secure access control model that supports the requirements of HR cases perfectly. As such, our case management solution was a good fit to give the client the integration, workflow uniqueness and access control it needed.

Workflow​

Each HR case had a unique workflow but all had commonality around creating, informing, resolving and closing. Between these shared steps, each case type developed its uniqueness.

Access control​

A rich combination of access levels and use of data classification allowed QuickCase to deliver the fine-grained access control requirements.

Access level​

In QuickCase, users are assigned one of 3 levels of access:

  • Organisation: Allows visibility of all cases within an organisation
  • Group: Restrict visibility to only cases explicitly granted to the user's group
  • Individual: Restrict visibility to only cases explicitly granted to the user

The visibility granted by the access level is always within the limits set by user roles and data classification.

In the context of this HR case management, this clearly establishes the boundaries between the 2 main types of actor:

  • HR team: Organisation access, responsible for managing and progressing all HR cases
  • Employees: Individual access, the employee only has visibility of the cases they initiated or took part in

Data classification​

Each element of data in QuickCase is assigned a classification level which determines how sensitive the data is. There are 3 levels of data classification, from least sensitive to most sensitive:

  1. Public
  2. Private
  3. Restricted

Similarly, each user in QuickCase is given a classification level which prevents them from seeing data more sensitive than their own classification level. For example, a user with classification Private will only have visibility of data that is either Public or Private and not Restricted.

The visibility granted by the data classification is always within the limits set by user roles and access levels.

For HR, data classification was used to limit visibility of cases either involving senior members of the company or cases involving members of the HR team (conflicts of interest). This was achieved by increasing classification of such cases to either Private or Restricted, restricting visibility to only the most senior HR staff.

Integration​

Leveraging both QuickCase's Rest APIs and webhooks, data could be linked and synchronised between Quickcase and the existing Employee Record System. Cases are initiated directly in QuickCase and employees involved are searched for in the Employee Record System and linked to the case transparently as part of the case creation.

Outcome​

A fast-to-market solution, with no integration but strong workflow and access control, was up and running within 6 weeks for company-wide use. To support that speed of delivery, initial configuration of some case types was available for test runs within the first week.

This fast approach and realisation provided confidence in the delivery, encouraged early feedback and enabled richer functionality to be developed, including the integration with the existing HR Employee Record System.