Workforce Planning - Embedding a Cadence

Overview

Any implementation of new tools or processes only survives if people see value in it and understand how improvements can continue to be incorporated (if you’re standing still, you’re actually going backwards).

Ownership

Clear ownership is key to making things sustainable.

Identifying ownership should consider the following areas:

Workforce planning as a concept: who owns the why and benefits - who cares enough to drive this bus (sponsor and champions)?
Workforce planning as a business process: who owns how and when workforce planning gets done - who can herd cats (process folk)?
Workforce planning participants: who owns the training and retraining of people doing workforce planning activities - who keeps people happy to be involved (L&D)?
Workforce planning procedures: who owns the intersection of the business process and the tools - who manages ongoing change and drives tool enhancements (continuous improvement folk)?
Workforce planning tool as a platform: who keeps the platform working - who fixes what breaks (clear boundaries and flow from internal customer support to TeamForm support)?

Cadence

Having a regular cadence for workforce planning activities helps to embed it into the “how we do things around here”.

Workforce planning can be run at multiple levels at once depending on the strategic horizon.

There is often some sort of annual planning cycle in place, so introducing a quarterly cadence enables benefits such as:

ability to assess and adapt earlier
finer grained trend analysis
time to reflect at the macro level

This results in significantly improved annual planning due to better data.