Plant-Level Strategy for Skills and Knowledge Secondary Roles

In multi-plant organizations, roles for managing skills, exams, work instructions, and troubleshoots in Poka should reflect your organizational hierarchy. This article explains a governance-based approach to assigning these secondary roles across plants using roles per plant.

The goal of this strategy is to ensure that the right people own standards, enforce consistency, and execute training locally. Defining this governance structure before assigning permissions helps prevent cross-plant editing conflicts, content duplication, and version confusion.

Before assigning Skill Manager, Exam Manager, or Knowledge Manager roles, define the following:

These answers determine how you structure permissions in Poka.

For general information about roles per plant, see Understand Roles per Plant Beta. For a full list of secondary roles and their capabilities, see User Roles and Permissions Explained.

Poka supports a three-level governance model for skills and knowledge roles. Each level serves a different purpose and maps to a different scope of permissions. You can use all three levels or only the levels that apply to your organization.

We believe this model can help you craft an approach that meets your objectives and requirements.

The global level is for corporate training, continuous improvement (CI), or quality leaders who define organization-wide standards. Users at this level create and maintain global skills, best practices, taxonomy (categories and levels), and monitor performance analytics across all plants.

Recommended secondary roles at this level:

If you want category-specific experts at the global level, consider using Knowledge Manager - Accessible Content Only instead of Knowledge Manager. This role limits creation and editing to categories assigned to the user's department.

Important: Global scope permissions allow editing across all skills, exams, work instructions, and troubleshoots in all plants. Keep this group small to avoid unintended changes.

The regional level is for regional training, or CI leads who oversee multiple plants within a region. Users at this level collaborate with local plants to apply corporate standards, support local managers to avoid content duplication, and monitor regional training performance.

Recommended secondary roles at this level:

Regional users should use their creation and editing permissions only when required to create regional standards. All other content creation and management should remain with global and local teams.

The local level is for plant-based Skill Managers, Exam Managers, and Knowledge Managers. These users are the system's local training experts. They create and manage plant-specific skills and training material, handle training and endorsements, and maintain local work instructions, troubleshoots, and processes.

Recommended secondary roles at this level:

You can also assign the Knowledge Creator with Local Scope to all employees who want to grant permission to contribute their experience and expertise to your knowledge base. This will help you capture tribal knowledge before it disappears.

Follow these recommendations when assigning skills and knowledge secondary roles in a multi-plant organization.

Three knowledge roles are available in Poka: Knowledge Creator, Knowledge Manager, and Knowledge Manager - Accessible Content Only. Assign only one of these roles per user. If you combine roles, use the same scope (global or local) for each role to provide a consistent experience.

Skills and exams are closely integrated in Poka. Assign the Skill Manager and Exam Manager roles to the same users to streamline training program management. Use the same scope for both roles.

Work instructions and troubleshoots are closely integrated with skills. When possible, assign a knowledge role, a skill role, and an exam role to the same users. This creates a comprehensive training manager who can manage the full training lifecycle at their level.

Although Poka allows you to assign different scopes to each secondary role, mixing scopes on the same user can cause confusion. A user with global scope on one role and local scope on another will have different experiences when performing similar actions. Provide a cohesive and consistent experience by using the same scope across all skills and knowledge roles for a given user.

Over-assigning global rights can lead to the following issues:

A well-structured governance model creates clear ownership, reusable global content, better analytics, and stronger compliance. The recommended approach is to maintain a small global core, light regional oversight, and strong local execution.

The following examples show how to apply the three-level governance model for skills and knowledge roles.

Corporate training leader defines global safety training standards: Assign Skill Manager (Global Scope) and Exam Manager (Global Scope). This user creates corporate-wide skills, categories, and compliance programs.

Regional CI lead oversees three plants in Europe: Assign Skill Manager (Local Scope) and Exam Manager (Local Scope), scoped to the three European plants. This user ensures global standards are applied consistently across the region.

The plant training coordinator manages skills and content at one site: Assign Skill Manager (Local Scope), Exam Manager (Local Scope), and Knowledge Creator, all scoped to the user's home plant. This user creates plant-specific skills, manages endorsements, and authors work instructions.