Workforce Planning - Design Decisions

Do you have an existing workforce planning process?

At what frequency do you plan?

What are the key dates associated with the planning process/QBR?

How do you expect TeamForm to align to and support the process and cadenced panning?

This will determine the number of planning projects that are required to be set up before we kick off a planning cycle so that data can be stored accordingly for planning and forecast.

By embedding or aligning expected activities that need to happen with existing workforce planning processes will streamline the process and data flow but more importantly help users adhere to what they need to do in order for planning to execute successfully.

If we run TeamForm as a separate tool and process it will increase the change effort and increase the risk of confusing users with the multiple planning cadences that they have to follow.

What is the aim of your workforce planning process? eg: To get clear of work objectives or to resource plan?

Getting clear on the process will help determine what tools are required, for what purpose and by when in the planning cycle. This will help users understand what their roles and responsibilities are throughout the cycle and in what tool they have to complete the activities.

At what point should we set your baseline date?

Without a baseline it makes it near impossible for leaders to draw a line in the sand for a point in time comparison of what gaps they have in their team based on the planned work and what they currently have.

Aligning the baseline date as closely as possible to the start of your planning cycle will ensure the data resonates and is the most relevant for leaders to compare and decide what changes they need to make during the planning cycle.

This date is a must in order for us to do any data comparison to know how teams have shifted over time and the reasonings behind the change.

Which demand team types will take part in your planning process?

Restrictions can be put on specific team types such as squads from being able to submit demand requests.

This will help determine the change effort required to roll out the planning cycle process and the tooling instructions accompanying it. TeamForm supports in-app announcements to specific user groups.

Which supply team types will take part in your planning process?

At what level do you allow demand requests to be raised against supply teams? eg: at teams level, teams of teams level, teams of team of teams level, etc

Restrictions can be applied to certain supply teams from being able to review and submit approved demand requests if they are not in-scope for the workforce planning process.

This drives where work demands can be raised against. eg: We may want to show Chapter Area as part of the org tree during Planning but we do not want teams to be able to raise demand requests against it.

How should do the supply team hierarchy look like in Planner?

This determines the visualisation of which team type and respective children hierarchy will appear in TeamForm Planner. The more levels you have involved in Planning, the harder it becomes for demand users to easily navigate and find the right team to raise demand requests against.

Do you have any pre-existing business logic to handling future dating employees' team allocations?

While TeamForm allow supply leaders to future allocate employees into teams, the business process of how this work needs to be rolled out along with the tooling functionality as it could have impacts on other existing business processes such as chargeback models and alignment to ways of working practices as you are effectively allowing people to shift in and out of teams rather than creating ‘persistent’ teams.

Do you wish to mandate demand requestors to input specific information such as skills and/or other tag information when raising a request?

The more information that can be provided up front to the supply leader about the demand request the less back and forth will be required between the two leaders and hence the quicker decisions can be made to the fulfil the demand request, allowing faster delivery kickoff.

At what level of the work taxonomy do you allow teams to complete their linkage?

Restrictions can be put on specific team types such as squads from being able to link to specific work taxonomy object such as OKRs if the connection is too high level/abstract.

This ensures the right traceability of how teams contribute to the overall enterprise strategy can be done and trusted as teams understand with the right level of details provided to them in making the decision.

This linkage will impact leaders from understanding whether the right teams have been allocated to the right team and whether the right priorities are being worked on by teams.

Do you want to send email baed notifications to your team during the planning cycle?

Automated notifications and/or dedicated email distribution lists can be provided to you so that you can easily send customised notifications specific group of users. Examples of this may be reminding them to update allocation so that workforce insights can be extrapolated or to review demand requests so that any contentious resource constraints can be discussed and resolved at a Dependency Marketplace.

This requires the specific notification content to be provided to TeamForm and the updated business logic to who should receive the notification, how and when.

What workforce insights are you after?

Based on the workforce insights you are after, does it require additional data points outside of TeamForm to build the view that you are after? you have a reporting team within your organisation to support the build of the report o

TeamForm’s reporting capability can only extract the data that is available within TeamForm. It is not a BI reporting tool that can pull data from other systems such as Oracle and ServiceNow to do complex integrated reporting.

This design decision will help determine whether it is better to pull our data from an API into your preferred BI tool to give you the insights you are after or whether it is something that can be done in Redash.

Do you have financial targets on demand teams, supply teams or both?

Do you want to display the budget as constraints in TeamForm?

Prerequisite of having budget constraints displayed is that a supply blended rate card need to have been pre-loaded into TeamForm. Without the rate card there is limited use to showing the team budget without showing how much the team is costing.

When budget and rate cards are both applied, as teams are planning their team composition based on the work that they need to deliver, it makes it a lot easier for them to know whether the composition created is within budget. If not, escalations can be raised early on.

Do you want to understand the high level cost estimate of each team?

Pre-requisite to this design decision is whether you have an enterprise blended rate card against your supply team. If you do not have one then costing cannot be done in TeamForm as individual level actuals costing cannot be done within the platform due to privacy reasons.

The high level cost should be served as an indication to leaders whether they are over or under their budget so that unnecessary assessment of demand requests can be avoided early on.

Do you want to limit users from being able to view, action requests and approvals requests on their own teams only?

While restricting certain people to have views of their own team, this limits transparency and collaboration between leaders to drive effective conversations.

Instead we recommend the ‘trust but verify’ model in using the History functionality in TeamForm to trace who has performed what actions within teams if data looks inaccurate rather than introducing viewing and actioning restrictions as it will introduce more admin effort to maintain the access list and for someone to jump in and help if for example is going on leave.

For supply leaders do you anticipate that they will be required by traditional teams / teams that have yet transformed into the new ways of working practices?

If so, how do you want them to engage the supply leaders to raise demand requests?

If there are traditional teams that have yet gone through transformation or made into ‘cross functional’ teams but need to take part in planning, we need to set them up in TeamForm as supply teams even if it is a holding structure so that demand requests can be made against them.

You also have the option to design a different demand request business process for these teams that users have to follow which does not involve TeamForm. However this increases difficulty and effort required to pull together a holistic view of all workforce demands and assess them against supply gaps. In addition, change effort will increase with having to teach 2 separate processes to users.

Do you want to force set a time period of when requests can be made and when approvals can happen?

TeamForm has the ability to restrict when demand requests can be entered, submitted, reviewed and approved. By putting in timed gates, it ensures all demand leaders are given enough time to review and adjust their team compositions based on the outcome of their strategic planning then allowing supply leaders to review all requests holistically to ensure the right skillsets are allocated to the right work priorities. Without this timed gates of when things can be done, it stops supply leads from having the holistic view of incoming demands to make the right priority calls as requests are coming in consistently.

How are vacancies managed as part of the planning process?

TeamForm has the ability for users to create placeholder roles to represent vacancies in Planner. However the end to end business process needs to be thought through of how this data will then get merged with the official HR recruitment tool as more often than not companies will have to go through proper costing approval flows before the vacancy is created in the HR system. The actual approval of these vacant roles by specific individuals are not supported in TeamForm as this functionality exists in HR systems.

Do you want leaders to commence forecasting their capability needs beyond current quarter?

If so, how far beyond the current quarter would you like leaders to forecast to?

This determines how many planning projects will be required to be established upfront so that future forecasting values can be saved and pulled into Planner as it becomes the current planning period. There is no limit to how many planning projects you set nor is there a limit to the frequency of these planning periods.

Are there any targets and/or constraints that you would like to display as leaders Forecast?

Similar to Planner, budgets can be loaded in Forecast and both shares the same prerequisite of needing a supply blended rate card to be pre-loaded into TeamForm. Without the rate card there is limited use to showing the team budget without showing how much the team is costing.

When budget and rate cards are both applied, as teams are planning their team composition it makes it a lot easier for them to know whether the composition created is within budget. If not, escalations can be raised early on.

Would you like to know how confident leaders are against their forecasted numbers?

Giving an early indication of how confident leaders are against their forecasted numbers allow Talent Acquisition and other teams that have a need for this data to better plan and be able to plan earlier on how they can support the business in achieving the forecasted workforce plan.

However, it can serve as a distraction if people misunderstand this confidence rating as a committed value rather than an indicative value.