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Strategic Workforce Planning with iiP
COE’s Strategic Workforce Planning tools allow organisations better meet the challenges of a rapidly changing economy. In other words, by using business strategy to align shifts in demand with the existing and future supply of human capital, organisations optimise the workforce to meet business goals, increase market share, and improve employee engagement.
Integration with Other HR Functions
So, Strategic Workforce Planning helps to simulate the workforce in numbers and competencies needed for certain demand patterns. This means, running workforce planning needs software support. Low cost and easy to handle solutions based on MS Excel, MS Access or similar would be workable. However, in many situations it is of advantage to have the database sitting in the cloud with access from anywhere at any time. Our iiP Workforce is such a solution.
Investing in People (iiP) is a competency-based suite that supports selected HR activities. Hence, advantages of iiP Workforce are:
- Integration of workforce planning with competency framework to enable identifying competency gaps during workforce planning.
- Incorporation of workforce planning with development planning for closing competency gaps.
- Fusion of workforce planning with Job Profile to link activities with jobs and staff. It helps assist with performance management and appraisal.
A Mirror Of Your Organisation
Since Workforce Planning must go – depending on the scope – through all core processes from top to down, it requires the system to mirror structure and processes of your organisation. iiP Workforce does exactly this.
Before any data entry can begin, iiP allows to generate the organisational AS-IS structure by:
- Determining structural names used in your organisation, i.e. division and/or department and/or section etc. This increases the acceptance.
- Defining and naming major indicators used for your organisation, i.e. for volume, units etc.
- Deciding about the desired output, i.e. value-added time, competencies needed, jobs required etc.
- Flowing down volume data into branches.
Data Collection is Key
Of course, Workforce Planning is all about data. Without proper data collection, the predictions of future workforce needs are flawed. Hence, the project will be an expensive waste of time. Therefore, it is important to invest in change management activities and proper introdcution to all involved.
Data entry is guided and follows the structure of the organisation prepared before. It includes
- information about the duration of process steps. An estimation of average time is required. Information about the variance is a helpful supplement to improve the prediction quality for daily routines.
- characteristics of process steps that would give hints for improvement such as automation potential and non-value-added portion.
- workforce requirements such as headcount, jobs and competencies needed to perform this activity.
Workforce Planning Results
Each workforce planning project digs deep into the nuts and bolts of the organisation. iiP workforce allows to show results at different level of aggregation and for download at any point in time.
Amongst other output, workforce planning results include
- an aggregation of information collected in the system for process duration, proportion of value-added and non-value-added activities.
- hints for automation potential hidden in the system the staff may have hinted when making the inputs.
- information about the utilisation of your workforce, i.e. whether the required workforce matches the actual.
- Information about time spent on non-value-added activities such as checks, approvals, meetings, repairs etc.
Usage of Workforce Planning Results
Each workforce planning project is – if done right – half-way through a business process reengineering project, since it offers great opportunities for improving structure, modernising and digitising processes, developing necessary competencies and redesigning jobs. Hence, with these assumptions put into iiP, the system is able to predict the workforce for future demands.
Of course, workforce planning results might be used for
- reducing non-value-added activities in an organisation.
- data-based decisions for digitisation or outsourcing of non-strategic activities.
- restructuring the organisation based on customer needs and process efficiency.
- planning to equip the workforce with new competencies to enable them to support new tools, methods and activities.
- forecasting the workforce needed for future plans.
Testing the Blueprint
Consequently, iiP Workforce is a safe way of experimenting with a process because any assumptions can be used for related predictions.
Lastly, predictions can be made for many indicators such as
- number of distinct related steps saved in activities.
- degree of value-added activities.
- degree of automation in the process.
- number of workforce needed after all changes are implemented.
- competencies that need to be developed if changes should be effective.
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