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Making Successful Human Resource Decisions: Using Workforce Planning to Manage the Workforce

What is Workforce Planning?

Workforce planning is a systematic, data-driven process of analyzing and evaluating an organization’s workforce to ensure that the right people with the right competencies are in the right place at the right time. Organizations typically use workforce planning to answer the following questions:

  • “Do we have the workforce we need to successfully execute our mission, both now and in the future?”
  • “Where are the staffing or competency gaps (or surpluses) we need to close to meet our strategic objectives?”
  • “What are the best ways to close these gaps, consistent with our organizational strategy and resources?”

Answers to these questions can inform the management of a full range of human resource (HR) functions, including recruitment and hiring, job classification and compensation, training and development, performance management, and retention.

What We Can Do

HumRRO understands that the effective use of workforce planning leads to more informed and successful HR decisions. Accordingly, our expertise and capabilities span the full cycle of workforce planning activities. They include:

  • Developing instruments (paper or web-based) for collecting the data needed for workforce analyses.
  • Designing and managing data collections to ensure that the information gathered meets the organization’s needs and any special reporting requirements.
  • Conducting gap analyses to assess the competencies of the existing workforce and identify potential gaps (or surpluses) with desired competency requirements.
  • Performing forecast analyses to estimate the number of employees likely to leave the organization within a specified time period.

Our Results: Using Workforce Planning to Manage the Federal Workforce

As in the private sector, workforce planning is growing increasingly important in the Federal government. Accordingly, the effective use of workforce planning is one of the key areas that the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) considers when evaluating Federal agencies' human capital management on the Human Capital portion of the President's Management Scorecard to determine whether an agency “gets to green.” HumRRO has completed workforce planning projects for multiple Federal agencies, crafting customized solutions to meet each agency’s specific needs and requirements.

Assessing Workforce Competency Gaps

HumRRO is training multiple agencies on how to use the Federal Competency Assessment Tools (FCAT) to assess and track the competency proficiency levels and gap closures in their workforce over time.

Forecasting Employee Turnover

HumRRO developed a model for a large Federal agency for use in forecasting the number of senior leaders likely to leave the workforce, as well as the number of candidates available to fill those positions.

Developing Human Capital Management Strategies

HumRRO has worked with several agencies to incorporate the results of our workforce analyses into their human capital management strategies (e.g., succession plans), while meeting their Human Capital Assessment and Accountability Framework (HCAAF) reporting requirements.

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