Preface

Rob Tripp and Dan L. Ward with Bill Maki

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 numbers—building 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.

DEDICATION

It would be impossible o list all the people who have provided assistance in the creation of this book, but we would like to specifically thank our wives and children for their continuing support while their fathers toiled many nights, weekends, and vacation days to nurture an idea to become this finished work. Thank you for bearing with us.

Also in particular, we want to recognize two workforce planning friends who continually provided sage advice, counsel, and sometimes just an argument when our not yet fully baked ideas needed refinement.

Thomas P. Bechet was a friend, colleague, and coeditor for us in Best Practices in Human Resource Forecasting and Modeling, the collection we did for HRPS in 1994. Tom passed away in 2008, but his influence continues.

Bill Maki started the journey with us for this book but had to pull out as a result of a health situation. We pray for his full recovery and look forward to his return and reengagement in future workforce planning topics.