Internal Departments - Use BUs, Teams?

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Posted on by MDS

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I'm trying to understand the best way to implement either Business Units or Teams in order to segregate internal departments.

We have 5 main departments within the organisation. Let's say we have custom entity of Jobs. There are several Job types. Depending on the type, a Job will be allocated to an internal department. When a user from that department views Jobs in CRM, they will automatically see Jobs that have been allocated to their department.

We need to be able to report on Jobs by department as well as Jobs by individual user.

To complicate things, we have several offices that again, we need to be able to refer to on Jobs.

My initial thought is that Business Units would represent offices and Teams represent departments. Any thoughts?

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JasonBenedetti 30 on at

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We've got a very similar business requirement where I am now, a lot of compliance behind it too. We've set it up the same way you have. Entities are set to team ownership and necessary views are in place to support that.

Reporting across the whole organisation isn't an issue, somebody in the root BU can see all the way down, reporting at a per-BU and per-team can report on those levels (On top of any BI reporting that needs to be done)

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Aric Levin - MVP 30,190 Moderator on at

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The main question that you need to ask regarding the separation Offices/Departments is the security.

Do users from one Office have access to the records of another office, and do users of one department have access to records of another department?

If the answer is that access is not shared between offices and departments that a separation of Business Units and Teams is the right separation.

If access is shared between offices and departments, there is no reason to separate into multiple Business Units, you can just have ownership of records based on teams, and set the ownership of records to teams so that you can have default team views, but other users will have access to those records as well if necessary.

Hope this helps.

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David Jennaway 14,065 on at

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You have several options based on how you've described it, and each can work well. However, there are 2 things to consider for the future:

Business Units have a hierarchy, and permissions can be assigned at different levels (e.g. BU level, or parent-child). If you think you'll ever need a hierarchy of permissions then BUs make sense

However, if you ever need to change your BU hierarchy, then this will need careful planning and implementation. If you use BUs, then you should be as confident as you can be that the structure is not likely to change in the future

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Syed Ibrahim 6,257 on at

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Better go by BU's because you can restrict or grant access by hierarchy. And you will have better control over when one person is moved from one dep to another

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Community Member on at

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Hi MDS,

i normally act as follows:

1) BUs represent "fisical" offices

2) Teams represent "logical group of persons"

3) Each BU (office or departments) has a "Office Team" which allow to external user to partecipate

So i use always BU to "place" people in the right office/department, with their own privileges.

Then i place people inside "Office Teams" when the need to access other offices.

Ownership of master records (Account/Contact/Lead) is always held by "Office Teams", and the visibility of related records is regulated by cascade behaviour.

Hope it helps.

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MDS 1,788 on at

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Thank you everyone for your answers - they are all very helpful.

On reflection, we probably just need to focus on departments rather than offices. We still need a degree of security based on departments though. Management will need an over-arching view of the whole data set, but departments will need ownership of certain elements that may then be shared amongst other departments. Business units? One for Management and then subordinate units for each department? Or Teams?.......

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