Collaborative Workforce Planning

Term Definition
Collaborative Workforce Planning is the process of building workforce planning processes from the bottom up. Workforce planning is the process of getting the right number of people with the rights skills, experiences and competencies in the right jobs at the right time to advance the business. Workforce planning is a comprehensive process that provides organizations with a framework for making staffing decisions based on its mission, strategic objectives, financial resources (budget), and a defined set of desired workforce competencies. Collaborative workforce planning involves representatives from different lines of business and varying responsibility levels in identifying the needs of the organization before outlining requirements and selecting a system.

Line of business owners, managers, and individual contributors all need to understand the strategic and operational priorities of the company, sales forecasts, changes in product and service lines, changes in customer composition and requirements, launches or divestures of business units, and capital investments that will impact productivity and demands for human capital.

The workforce planning system should encourage employee participation, such as the ability to input and update current skills, rank work interests, and identify perceived training needs based on this information. Managers should be able to estimate voluntary and involuntary turnover, model different time/cost/utilization scenarios based on various resource assignments, and have access to the information required to justify training and hiring decisions. Line of Business owners should be able to ensure that processes for requesting and assigning talent, accounting for time, executing projects and billing customers are followed. Executives should receive the reports they need for compliance records, as well as to guide the strategic growth of each business unit.

A collaborative workforce planning system should let users make easy  real-time changes to processes, workflow patterns, talent assignments and reports, as usage drives better understanding of how to optimize the system.

Related Terms
Resource Management & Scheduling

Your Comments and Recommendations

Please help us improve the project management software glossary. Was this term well described? Any suggestions of how we can improve the description, what to add, remove or change? You can also use this form to suggest new project management terms we should add to the glossary.