Dan Ward - Positioned: Strategic Workforce Planning That Gets the Right Person in the Right Job

Strategic Workforce Planning
That Gets the Right Person in the Right Job

Dan L. Ward

and Rob Tripp with Bill Maki

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ward, Dan L.

Positioned : strategic workforce planning that gets the right person in the right job / Dan L. Ward and Rob Tripp, with Bill Maki.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8144-3247-1

ISBN-10: 0-8144-3247-6

1. Manpower planning. 2. Personnel management. 3. Strategic planning. I. Tripp, Rob. II. Maki, Bill. III. Title.

HF5549.5.M3W37 2013

658.301dc23

2012040290

2013 Rob Tripp and Dan L. Ward

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Printing number

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Rob Tripp and Dan L. Ward with Bill Maki

Dan L. Ward

James W. Walker

Dan L. Ward

Alex G. Manganaris

Rob Tripp

Robert D. Motion

Dianna Peterson and Tina Krieger

Mary Boudreaux Carroll

David Howerton

Jeff Buchmiller

Naomi Stanford

James David Eyring and Alison Romney Eyring

Marta Brito Perez

Rachel Bangasser

Laura Chalkley

Marco Better, Fred Glover, Dave Sutherland, and Manuel Laguna

Peter Howes

Dan Hilbert

Rob Tripp

Jeremy Shapiro and Thomas H. Davenport

Leo Sadovy and Christian Haxholdt

Amit B. Mohindra and J. Allan Brown

Dan L. Ward

Jac Fitz-enz

John Boudreau and Ian Ziskin

Steve Arneson

Dave Ulrich

Dan L. Ward

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT the variety of tools, techniques, and processes collectively known as Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP.) It is about getting people resources when and where you need them and doing it efficiently and effectively. SWP is a fundamental requirement for survival as an organization. When done well, it provides competitive advantage. When done poorly, it results in a breakdown of the alignment between objectives and execution.

The authors of the individual pieces you will find in this book were selected because they are among the best in the world as shown by their actual performance or their record of effective research and analysis on workforce-related topics. The book is divided into four primary sections. The first provides a historical perspective on the evolution of the field, the second provides firsthand accounts from some of the people currently practicing in the field, the third drills down into analytics that have emerged as the field has matured, and the fourth takes a look at future directions for this type of work.

In the 1970s, the U.S. Department of Labor provided Manpower Institution Grants to a number of universities to promote study of improved workforce analysis. Dan Ward was one of the products of an applied economics graduate program developed under this funding, with a strong focus on econometric modeling and applying cost measurement techniques to social sciences. We measured everything that we could measure and counted everything we could count and created forecasts, projections, and simulations, he says.

Rob Tripp came to this field from a different direction. With a Ph.D. in statistics, he was hired right out of graduate school into the U.S. auto industry, where he built complex models to simulate the impact of business actions on the hourly workforce, supporting strategic business planning and union contract negotiations.

Many traditional human resources colleagues were envious of the successes of these people, who were bringing a quantitative approach to workforce issues. These new workforce planners always seemed to be able to get funding for their proposals, while most traditional HR projects were rejected. The reason was simple. These trained workforce planners came to the table armed with hard data and spoke the language of business: numbers. It was a heady period for the early workforce planning professionals. We made forecasts of turnover and projected recruiting and staffing numbersbuilding beautiful models and scenarios that drove action plans.

Over the years, we began to realize that while these tools were critical, they were not sufficient in and of themselves. We regularly hear truisms such as What gets measured gets done. What gets rewarded gets repeated. We realized that performance metrics can drive behavior but not always the desired behavior. Ineffective or misguided planning can take an organization down the wrong path. There can be serious unintended and unrecognized consequences of a well-executed but poorly conceived plan.

In his presentations, John Boudreau uses a slide that says Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted. Our solutions need to blend comprehensive data with social, behavioral, and cultural insights to be truly effective in the long run. Truly effective Strategic Workforce Planning is more than an exercise to run the numbers: It is ultimately a disciplined conversation about talent, especially strategically critical talent, and it puts the metrics, projections, forecasts, and scenarios in a total organizational context and ensures that the discrete parts are aligned against a truly strategic perspective.