Right-Size Your Workforce Planning team

My industry peers and colleagues often ask, “How do you determine the number of people in a Workforce Planning organization?”  My response is, “Well…that depends!  Before you can answer that for your organization you have to decide what you want “workforce planning” to do for your organization.”

Here’s my reply to one such inquiry (other than her name, the letters are unchanged from the originals).

On 04/05/09 4:44 PM, Michelle wrote:
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John,

Thanks so much for your post as it is most helpful.  I can tell by the lessons learned you posted that you have been down the path & know all to well what does/doesn’t work.

One thing you mention is having the right skills for the members of the team.  I’m working to set up a WFP COE now that is very much in line with the way you lay out the skills (business-centric and analytical).  We are also working to avoid the zealots mentality - but what type of standard to you use to determine WHO and HOW MANY WFP planners with access to talent data & analysis are needed to work with the business on forecasting talent needs & aligning to talent mgmt strategies?

Thanks,

Michelle

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My Response:

Hi Michelle,

I don’t think there’s any one answer to “who” and “how many”.  It depends on the nature of the workforce, the culture of the company, and the strength of the interfacing work groups.  There is also a wide variation in what tasks or “sub-functions” different companies include in “workforce planning.”  I know of one Fortune 500 company with 15K employees that has one analyst doing workforce planning.  It works for that company because the distributed field HR reps have a very active role in local workforce planning and workforce development.

In my current situation, we have a senior manager and four full time analysts for a business unit of about 6000 employees.  My team does analysis and forecasting, creates the staffing plans, oversees the knowledge management program, and implements what we call “organizational configuration control.”  We also are the lead on several workforce development activities with colleges and universities around the USA.

I derived the size and structure of the organization by working with the President & CEO to determine what we wanted workforce planning to accomplish and encompass.  From that vision I built the business plan and a resource-loaded work plan to accomplish the goals within an agreed upon time line. That laid the ground work for determining how large the organization needed to be, and what core skills and competencies the group needed to possess.  Then it was a matter of finding the right people with the best set of skills and personalities to form the team.  Once the right people were in place everything took off.

The same approach would work elsewhere if senior leadership is engaged and supportive.

Regards,

John