This article describes a five-step process for planning and executing organisational changes that affect eADM and its connected integrations, minimising the risk of broken access rights, orphaned integration data, or unnoticed side effects.
Note: This process applies to any organisational change of meaningful scope: restructuring, mergers, splitting departments, or aligning with Visma's Recommended Organizational Structure and its Impact on eADM. For smaller, single-unit moves, see Handling Organizational Changes in Visma Enterprise HRM instead.
1. Establish Clarity on All Changes in Advance
Before any technical work starts, the full scope of the reorganisation must be known and documented. An incomplete or approximate list of changes is the most common cause of problems later in the process.
Build an Overview of All Changes
Create a single overview listing every organisational unit affected by the change, at any level of the hierarchy. We recommend a structure along these lines:
|
Unit name (any level) |
Type of change |
Effective date |
Current unit number in Visma |
New unit number in Visma |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Example: Teknisk drift |
New |
— |
4210 |
|
|
Example: Bygg og eiendom |
Discontinued |
3120 |
— |
The overview must cover both of the following:
-
Every organisational unit to be newly established, at any level, together with its new unit number.
-
Every organisational unit to be discontinued, at any level, together with its existing unit number.
Our clear recommendation: do not reuse unit numbers. Reusing a discontinued unit's number for a new unit causes eADM and connected target systems to conflate the two units, which corrupts historical data and access history.
2. Map the Rule Sets Affected by the Changes
Use the overview from Step 1 to identify every rule set that references any of the affected unit numbers. This includes rule sets governing:
-
Group membership
-
Licence assignment
-
Other access rights
Extend the relevant rule sets with the new unit numbers before the organisational changes are imported into eADM. Doing this in advance ensures that new units are correctly covered by access and licensing rules from the moment they appear in eADM, rather than after the fact.
3. Map Integrations to Target Systems
For each integration connected to eADM, assess the following two questions.
3.1 Does the Target System Need Manual Updates to Unit Numbers?
Case and records management systems (Acos WebSak, P360, and similar) and Compilo typically require the system owner to manually enter the new unit numbers in ExternId before the organisational changes are imported into eADM.
3.2 Does the Target System Need a Quality Check?
Check whether the target system needs a quality check regarding:
-
The rule sets used for access management
-
The departments that are exported to it
-
The configuration of the organisational structure it consumes (for example, Glup or KS)
4. Plan the Execution, Assign Tasks, and Communicate Internally
Agree and communicate the freeze windows needed for the change, since the length of a freeze depends on the scope of the change and whether it is executed in one go or phased:
-
eADM freeze: from a few days to two weeks, depending on scope and phasing.
-
Integration freeze: from a few days to two weeks, depending on scope and phasing.
Assign clear ownership for each task in Steps 1 to 3, and communicate the plan and freeze windows to everyone affected before execution begins.
5. Execute the Organisational Changes in Phases
Execute the organisational changes in phases rather than all at once, for example one service area at a time. For each phase:
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Disable the synchronisation steps for integrations that this phase does not affect yet.
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Disable message flows that could be triggered by the organisational changes.
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Import the organisational changes into eADM.
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Check the results and take spot checks to confirm the changes have not caused unforeseen consequences.
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Correct any issues found, then continue with the next phase of organisational changes.
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Re-enable the message flows and integrations.
Note: Phasing the rollout, rather than importing every change at once, makes step 5.4 far more effective: a smaller batch of changes makes unintended consequences easier to isolate and correct before moving on.
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