Winning Business with Strategic Workforce Management: Finding the Right People for the Right Jobs at the Right Time
By Azita Gandjei, Ed Park - Primavera Systems, Inc.
Introduction
The first paper in this series noted that during vendor selection one of the customer’s first priorities has become understanding the quality of a Professional Service Organization’s (PSO’s) workforce.
With that in mind, this second paper asserts that to win and retain business – to build a brand that has real value – you need to build your hiring, training, and resource assignment plan around clear strategic goals. Those goals should emerge from an informed understanding of industry trends and of the strengths and weaknesses of your own workforce; in other words, a portfolio approach to strategic workforce management. Primavera can be a key partner in implementing that approach.
Right People, Right Jobs, Right Time
What follows is an example of what happens without a portfolio approach to strategic workforce management Steve is a partner at a large professional services organization. He knew that margins were probably shrinking on a few established project types, but he’s disturbed to find that that those margins have shrunk to as little as 11 percent and that most of the people he considers his A team “high performance, high potential employees” are tied up on those projects. When he looks at his pipeline, he finds his A people either don’t have the training they need or are not available to staff a new type of high priority project. Nor can Steve find or train the high quality people he needs in time.
Steve's dilemma is all too common, but it's also understandable, given the difficult challenge of proactively managing your workforce without insight into emerging trends that will drive future business growth. That insight is only possible with a fully integrated picture of your demand pipeline, a picture that includes strategically important positions, the skills needed to meet demand, and the detailed skill sets of your workforce.
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