Strategic Planning for Human Resources: Quick Guide | Gartner

As senior leaders continue to reset business strategy amidst a quickly changing business environment, it has become increasingly evident that these plans need to be streamlined and have greater flexibility. Said differently, these plans will need to rely on “adaptive strategies that can flex with evolving conditions.” And as many HR organizations are in the process of refining their plans for the remainder of 2020 and also for 2021, this Gartner resource offers four planning components that HR organizations can leverage as they develop agile plans. The components include: 1) identify a shortlist of metrics to describe the function’s target state, 2) document and monitor key assumptions, 3) identify key initiatives and milestones required to move to the end state, and 4) craft a succinct statement that captures the essence of the strategy. To make it easier to concisely capture each of the four elements, pages 5 and 6 provide a template that can be used. HR leaders and their teams can use this approach to distill strategic planning down to only the essential parts–which will enable a “clear, effective, measurable, and communicable plan.”