Problem Statement

The intention is to move from the question at the start of the phase to the position at the end of the phase:

Do we have a problem? → We think this problem is worth resolving

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Forming a Problem Statement

Customers often have an initial hypothesis about the pain points that team-centric workforce planning may be an answer for. Alternatively, TeamForm consultants and partners can identify and elevate the pain points they observe.

The typical challenges are around transparency of workforce decisions, ensuring that teams are setup with the roles and capabilities they need to successfully deliver their work, and funding of the team workforces.

A clear, pressing, and agreed workforce planning problem statement enables us to rally enthusiasm and resources to address the problem.

The problem statement should include:

what the perceived pain points are
how investing in workforce planning would address these pain points
why these pain points should be addressed now; they should be the next major impediment to improvement
who the core stakeholders are

The outcome of defining the problem statement is the approval to proceed with running TeamForm’s approach to Workforce Planning with the customer.

Workforce planning Challenges and Pain Points

	Key questions	Challenges / blockers	Impacts	TeamForm
Organisation wide	Are strategy, work and people aligned Can we pivot as strategy and goals change and adapt What are the market / macro trends impacting talent availability	Getting a representative view of cost based on how teams work Visibility around workforce alignment is limited It is challenging to know when structural changes are needed v.s. incremental hiring	Workforce challenges can impact both business and customer outcomes Ability to adapt to changing needs and priorities is limited Attrition being driven by lack of internal mobility opportunities	Ability to plan, schedule and staff people into teams over time Transparency of objectives, work, teams and people enables incremental team structure changes over time, avoiding large expensive re-orgs
Delivery Teams e.g. team s, teams of teams	Does the team have the right mix of staff, capability and skills to deliver outcomes Is there clarity around outcomes and priorities for the team to work on in the next planning cycle What is the impact of unplanned work How is the work of the team connected to the organisations strategy	Too many re-orgs, funding process isn’t clear and priorities keep changing without any clarity of why Teams are maxed out capacity wise and often stuck starting more work, than being able to finish Teams feel stuck in feature factories pumping out work but not sure why (low empowerment and agency)	Delivery of successful outcomes is impacted as teams are overworked and not sure which work should be done in which sequence Teams suffer from significant unplanned work from senior stockholders who override priority due to lack of transparency Lack of clarity and linkage to strategy creates uncertainty for teams and contributes to attrition	Ability to overlay demand against the actual work, rather than yet another role to hire. Visualise demand across teams from a supply perspective enables a broader understanding of people, skills and capability needs (where to invest in learning vs hiring)
Supporting functions e.g. HR, Finance	How much is being invested in our initiatives Are we getting the the results we are looking for from our people What does the workforce look like in the coming years vs what we have in place today (e.g. AI skills)	Processes are often driven by offline Excel documents that need to be reconciled Processes are designed for support functions rather than the teams / people doing the work Focusing too much on cost, leads to sub-optimal choices for team composition	Too much focus on maximising utilisation rather than what is needed to successfully enable our highest priorities Wasted effort and time on skills projects to document skills and capabilities of people that go nowhere Funding models influence people’s behaviour to keep stakeholders happy rather than focus on organisational strategy and priorities	Visualise indicative costs over planning horizons using rate cards Leverage data for longer term trends around skills / roles to support talent pipeline Reduced need for large central coordination effort as teams are empowered to plan themselves.

Problem Statement - Examples

Transparency on Allocating People to Teams for Prioritised Work

Transparency problem statement

Our quarterly planning process has focused on prioritising our outcomes and the work we plan to get done to enable these outcomes in the coming quarter.

For the past 6 quarters, we have found that debate and escalations continue through the quarter to resolve which teams of teams will be accountable for this work, and to allocate key staff to these prioritised areas.

In discussion with leaders, we have learnt that the root causes are a mix of key staff being required for longer than was expected to complete other priority work, or a change in work priority where work is stopped in order to make key staff available, but this is then not being clearly communicated.

Our hypothesis for improvement is to discover and define a simple workforce planning component to quarterly planning, where decisions on work prioritisation are reviewed and aligned with the delivery teams and team members that will work on them. This transparency is expected to reduce escalations by half in the first instance, from 80 last quarter to 40 or less next quarter.

To act on this hypothesis, the key stakeholders will be Alice and Jack (Team of Team of Team leads for high priority initiative areas), Bob and Elise (most contended chapter area leads that supply the capability and capacity for those initiatives), Dawn from Finance, and Mike from People and Culture. They will attend the kick-off session next Friday along with the designated Way of Working team.

Global Technology Delivery Maturity Model

Delivery problem statement

As we have expanded our geographic customer reach, we have found it important to expand our approach to staffing in order to have employees geographically close to customers, and to widen the talent pool that our organisation can draw from to deliver our strategic outcomes.

Over the past 9 months as new delivery centres have been setup to support our Pilipino and Indian business units, we have found that employee engagement levels and productivity levels in these countries is much lower than in our established businesses. As a result, our delivery to strategic outcomes has taken significantly longer, required significantly more people, and significantly more funding than initially expected.

In discussions with leaders, we have found that the new delivery teams have struggled with lack of context for the work they are doing, lack of empowerment to complete this work, and an initial teaming structure that augments existing squads in established countries with very little overlap in work hours.

Our hypothesis for improvement is the implementation of a squad maturity model that will favour geographically co-locating people at the teams of teams level with the teams that deliver customer value streams and core technology platforms. Over the next four quarters, we expect to move 80% of our staff to geographically co-located teams, reducing people in team augmentation roles to less than one in five. To enable this, next quarter we will identify the team roles and capabilities that we are short on in order to get an endorsed training and recruitment plan.

To act on this this hypothesis, the key stakeholders will be Amanda and Steve from technology, Al from our Pilipino business, and Alice and Jack (Team of Team of Team leads for high priority initiative areas). They will attend the kick-off session next Friday along with the designated Way of Working team.