CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

One of the things that has recently leapt out at me as a feature that would be really useful, is the ability to track the Start and End dates of particular "Job Titles" that a person has with "Employers" - or even more broadly, when they started and stopped having particular "Roles" within an "Organisation".

While the functionality for Start and End dates for relationships and groups has been around for awhile now, often you want to know more than when an individual started or stopped being an "Employee of" an Organisation, as they may have had various roles during that time.

I took a look around the wiki and found this suggestion by Peter Davis almost a year ago: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/New+contact+type+for+Position+or+Office.

I think that while not exactly the same, these two issues could substantially be addressed by adding an "Identities"/"Roles"/"Personas" (call it what you will - probably Roles is clearest) feature for individuals, which is becoming increasingly common for identity management services like Plaxo, LinkedIn and MyOpenID.

This would involve moving the "Job Title", "Current Employer" and (perhaps) "Website" fields to a new block beneath the person's name but above their Communication Preferences, that displayed:

Current

Role                           Organisation                             Start


You would then have a "History" link that would show the person's past roles, including both Start and End dates.

I am a bit wary of the accessibility issues for ajax development, but the above could hopefully be done with ajax with a little + button at the end of the "Current" section where you can quickly add a new role.  Ideally this would be typing the name of the organisation, which would do a lookup on existing organisations and if not found add a new one, then going to Role you would see a drop down list of existing roles for that organisation and if there was no matching one you could type your own new one.

In the Organisation record, under the Relationships tab you could then have Roles listed with all the people who currently have Roles with that Organisation as follows:

Current

Role                           Individual                             Start

Again, you could have a "History" link and an ajax add facility to give people roles with that organisation from this Relationships tab.  Of course you'd have to be careful you gave the right "Andrew Perry" the particular role.

If you click on a particular Role within the listing, it could bring up a summary page for that role that shows the people who have held that role and if there is an option in the "Activities" recording panel to select which "Role" you engaged with the person, this summary page could provide a history of the "Activities" relevant to that Role (such as telephone discussions, emails etc).

In Advanced Search, you ideally could search on Role so that if you use a common naming convention across organisations such as Schools, Governments, etc, you could search on "Principal" or "Mayor" with optional "Organisation" and date range, in order to find all the people holding that role within the relevant date range.

Thoughts?

I actually like the fusion that is apparent here - there are scenarios where we want people as 'employee' of several organisations concurrently and having those in the Summary screen.

So the hybrid of having what andrew is suggesting, with Michal's suggestion of taking a multiple field approach sounds interesting possibility - effectively the 'employee of' relationship is being 'forced' in to the existing set up - how about extending that so you can specify the Relationship as part of this (sometimes the most 'important role' a person has is that they are a 'chair of the board' but that is not accurately an 'employee of' relationship.

So something like

Role           Relationship                Organisation                             Start       End

but of course if End date is filled in it ceases to be on Summary shee and simply shows on the relationship Tab as Inactive (or Previous might be a better term)

Hi Andrew - not that I have noticed. I haven't hit a project that has screamed out for this, but I still believe there is something missing in this regard, which this post pretty closely addresses. We have done work to set up a tab that records the history of addresses for clients, so that each time a new one is added, this (or the previous one, can't recollect which) gets added as a multiple record type to the new tab.
So we may have something that might be a kick start - but Eileen might point out the gaps in my knowledge on this.