Workforce planning empowers managers to improve team strength, ensure availability, and focus on growth for long-term success. By reviewing the existing resource bench, forecasting requirements, and providing the right infrastructure to resources, companies can deliver projects with greater efficiency.
The right enterprise resource planning tool can empower firms to develop strengthened workforce plans for dynamic fulfilment needs.
Why develop a workforce plan for an enterprise?
There are several benefits of developing a comprehensive workforce plan for an organization, especially as companies scale up to execute larger projects across multiple domains.
1. Structuring workforce strategic initiatives
Worker additions, training, functional expertise, and pipeline fulfilment can be strategically accomplished with the right workforce plan. Firms can improve their resource planning and allocation for better on-ground delivery with greater visibility and strategic foresight.
2. Streamlining daily activities and objectives
A strategic workforce plan helps in streamlining daily activities for resources across functions, enabling them to deliver targets in a productive way. Key communication gaps are filled via technology platforms, and collaboration can be prioritized through a comprehensive workforce plan.
3. Mitigating the risk of non-availability
With a complete workforce roadmap and strategic plan, companies can mitigate the risk of double booking, lockout, non-availability, and approvals delays. There is minimal risk of cost and schedule overruns, and teams can deliver synchronously across projects.
4. Improving retention of quality resources
By adopting a scientific and data-driven approach to workforce planning, firms can understand deeper insights into resource strengths. By providing the right training and opportunities, resources can remain integral to project delivery, thereby improving retention across local and remote workforce networks.
How enterprises can strengthen workforce planning
The preliminary strategy for strengthening workforce planning is data analysis. By organizing and mapping productivity, manhours, billing, utilization, and output, companies can review their resource pool analytically. Key insights can be derived which can be implemented into workforce planning for training, acquisition, onboarding, and allocation.
Another essential pathway to strengthening workforce planning for professional services firms is technology adoption. With the right technology ecosystem, companies can prepare in-depth workforce plans, improve collaboration, centralize data, and add stakeholders seamlessly. Growth can be accomplished efficiently with the right enterprise resource planning solution.
Improving forecasting capabilities through surveys, assessments, and pipeline analyses can also aid in strengthening a workforce plan. Both excess and shortfalls can be analysed across functions, to review employee strength, capabilities, and structure across project types. Firms can scale up seamlessly when they understand their pipeline coherently along with their resource fulfilment capacity long-term.
In conclusion
By strengthening workforce planning through an enterprise resource planning platform, firms can improve oversight over requirements and fulfilment capabilities. Different project types, such as IT, engineering, medical, and construction, require a wide range of skillsets which resources need to acquire. Through workforce planning, firms can reduce project risks and improve profitability through better scalability.
