Changing or ending Deployments of an employee can sometimes be more difficult than expected. This guide will outline common issues and how they can be resolved.
1. The employee is a manager and their deployment cannot be ended
Any employee with subordinates cannot have their deployment changed or ended through their person record. If you try to do this, you may encounter an error similar to this screenshot:
If you are trying to change the deployment of a manager, we would recommend using the Move or Replace Employees Tool found under the People tab.
This option will be suitable if you want the manager to keep all direct reports they have, or if you want to move all of them to another person.
If the direct reports of the manager are to be split between other people, you will need to manually do this instead.
If you navigate to the deployment record that you are trying to close off, you can click on the 'Add Subordinates to Set' option, which will give you a list of the direct reports on the reference date:
From there, you can access the set on the right hand side of the system and quickly navigate between the subordinates to change their reporting line:
2. Values of the dates for the Org Units/Positions are not consistent with the values in the related Position Details row.
When assigning an employee to a new Org Unit or Position, the dates set up for that Org Unit or Position need to be consistent with the dates of the new deployment of the employee.
You can check this by going to
Administration >> Organisation >> Org Unit or Positions tab >> Find the Org Unit or Position >> Check the effective from and effective to dates:
In this example, I would only be able to assign the 'Test Position' to an employee if their deployment start date was on 30/06/2025 or after.
The simplest solution to this would be to change the dates in the Org Unit or Position itself. If you do not need a specific date, then you may choose to set this to a date years in the past, for example 01/01/2010, to avoid any further errors.
If you cannot find your Org Unit or Position, there will be 'All Org Units' or 'All Positions' option which will list those that are not yet active:
3. Issues with the Manager of Unit option
If assigning a person to be the Org Unit Manager in a new deployment, you will need to make sure that there is not another Org Unit Manager's who has a deployment that overlaps with this new deployment:
Since there can only be one Org Unit Manager at a time, you will need to check this by going to
Administration >> Organisation >> Org Units >> Select Org Unit >> People in Org Unit (all) >> Check to see who the current Org Unit Manager is:
In this example, we can see that the second employee is the Org Unit Manager from 04/04/2013 to open ended. If I wanted to make the first employee the Org Unit Manager, then the second employee's deployment would have to end on 31/12/2024, as the first employee's deployment starts on 01/01/2025.
While you can untick the Org Unit Manager from an existing manager, this will remove any historical data of them being the Org Unit Manager, so we would not recommend doing that for most situations.
The other workaround would be to use the move or replace tool for the previous manager to create a new deployment where they are not the manager.