Meet Business Outcomes by Evolving to Strategic Workforce Planning | Deloitte

Many organizations are evolving from traditional operational workforce planning to strategic workforce planning (SWP). As highlighted in this Deloitte paper, operational workforce planning focuses on current and near-term workforce supply and demand, whereas SWP explores “what if” scenarios, taking into account new strategic initiatives, mergers and acquisitions, organizational design, and location strategy, among others. In other words, strategic workforce planning utilizes operational baseline data and considers long-term business demands to model workforce needs for various potential scenarios the organization may encounter. The paper suggests ways to use operational workforce planning as a stepping stone towards SWP. Given the pivotal role of scenario planning in SWP, I’m sharing four resources on this subject: 1) A one-page editable PDF by Xplane that helps organizations identify four “what-if” scenarios they may face in the future. 2) Gartner’s Scenario Implication Diagnostic, which provides over 60 diagnostic questions to help understand the implications of internal and external factors that can inform different scenarios, 3) Deloitte’s framework (page 6) of four scenarios related to inflation; although focused on inflation, the approach and examples can be applied to various scenario types, and 4) Gartner’s Guide to Scenario Planning for Functional Leaders, which helps address seven questions about scenario planning.