Position planning

Common Challenges

Annual budgeting processes typically deliver aggregate plans based off high-level planning assumptions.  In the words of one CFO, “a simplified view to deliver a cost envelope within time constraints”.  Once budgets are approved, the scramble is on to develop an operational plan, but operational leaders are often ill-equipped:

We only did headcount planning, and didn’t do position planning … We would see ‘+100’ in the Finance plan, but Talent  Acquisition had no idea when they were going to be brought on, what those positions were, or where they were to be located.

At every reporting period, painful, time-consuming, manual reconciliation is needed to reveal the underlying reasons for changes in the size and cost of the workforce and whether this is in line with established business plans.

Orgvue Value

Establishing positions as the basis for planning and providing colleagues with a shared environment to plan changes is recognized by leading practitioners as their “pivotal moment”. As position-level changes are planned, the impact of planned changes on the size, cost and structure of the organization is immediately seen. Specifying positions with planned costs and dates generates forward-looking insight to identify where course correction is needed to stay in line with established budgets.

Orgvue enables complex work to be automated:  Embedded calculations removes the need for colleagues’ to the calculate cost impacts of changes:  Manual reconciliation is avoided through insight revealing the underlying reasons for changes between reporting periods, and variance from forecasts. Clarity on the volume of hiring activity and the positions to be recruited provides the operational insight required for Talent Acquisition to deliver.

“Establishing positions was the pivotal moment.  This now provides our baseline for planning the workforce over the next financial cycle.”

“Getting control over positions has equipped us with an accurate baseline for budgeting, workforce planning and organization design.”

“I can say this because I am in the industry:  HR historically hasn’t historically had a good analytical capability.  We appreciated this capability wasn’t going to be built overnight, so focused on simplifying the work and automating as much as possible”

“No-one want to be planning positions and manually calculating the in-year employment cost and how this will impact aggregate costs for the reporting line.  We challenged ourselves to purge the manual work.”

“On a monthly cadence, People Partners, Finance Partners and Talent Acquisition convene to review the latest status of the plan to ensure that committed outcomes can be delivered.”

Business Impact

• Efficiency through a consistent baseline for business planning, organization design and workforce planning.
• Time saved reconciling/ reporting the changing workforce size and cost at every reporting period
• Forward-looking insight to identify where course-correction is needed for the workforce cost base to stay in line with established budgets
• Time saved reconciling/ reporting the changing workforce size and cost at every reporting period
• Mitigation of operational risk through clarity on hiring demand