Post-Pandemic Planning | Gartner

During the pandemic, there have been various frameworks available to organizations as they make resource and investment choices that help them to recover. This report by Gartner provides five main paths that can be used to represent most of the journeys an organization will take during the pandemic. The paths aren’t a destination in themselves but rather a track that can be used to effectively plan. They include 1) Return – these organizations faced a temporary change but will return to the pre-pandemic activity level. Action is to plan for a gradual and dynamic return to regular operations 2) Reduce – firms that are returning to lower levels than before the pandemic due to low demand, low supply capacity to fulfill the demand, or because the firm has made a choice to reduce operations in a part(s) of the business. 3) Retire – business can no longer be sustained, post-pandemic. These may have been organizations that were already struggling prior to the crisis or who have made the choice to sunset part of their business and reinvent. 4) Reinvent – cases in which the current business model is under pressure from COVID-19 and a need or opportunity is identified to change the business or operating model. For example, many organizations are leveraging digital channels to deliver their services, such as medical practitioners offering telemedicine, fitness centers that offer online classes, and restaurants with “delivery only”models. 5) Rescale – these are organizations that have benefited from the shutdown and will continue to accelerate newfound growth, such as remote work providers (e.g. Zoom, Webex). Organizations can use this framework and other insights in this report to determine workforce planning implications and responses for each path. As a supplement to this article, I am also including a separate link to a 5-minute video from Gartner that aligns with a few of the concepts from the report.