Amid today’s highly disrupted business landscape, organisations must rethink how they plan for future success as they contend with external forces that are fast transforming long-established enterprise practices. In this evolving context, organisations need adaptable financial and operational planning that can enable their teams to design agility into the workforce.

The imperative for more adaptive business models is becoming increasingly clear as the speed, scale, and need for greater dexterity in how organisations respond to market forces is shifting people out of the typical functional silos and into cross-functional teams. Advances in digital technology, a greater reliance on data, and changing customer drivers are forcing a re-think on traditional workforce silos, how teams actually work vs need to work, and the methodologies that reshape how work is done

According to the World Economic Forum, some 60 per cent of the skills that will be required in the next decade don’t yet exist meaning that the way people work — where, when, why and how — will likely look completely different in a decade’s time.

As the world of work transforms, it is via innovative financial and operational modelling and planning that organisations can respond efficiently — and at speed — to changing market dynamics.

Flexibility and adaptability are now key

Turbo-charged since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, an increasing number of organisations recognise that they need to be able to adapt in order to successfully navigate more volatile market conditions.

A key plank in business future-proofing is driving greater agility into organisational structures that will support an adaptive enterprise so that its teams can deliver benefits from business, digital and people strategies irrespective of changes in the business landscape.

For many business leaders, it’s a paradigm shift that requires a foundational rethink from accepted modes of planning and financial modelling to a more informed understanding of the impact of planned workforce changes will have. While an organisation may recognise that how its workforce is currently organised will have to fundamentally shift both headcount and cost as it reorganises its workforces, the ability to rapidly model a range of scenarios across the organisation and better understand the consequences in terms of headcount, cost centres, and forecasts is proving to be immensely valuable.

Utilising planning and analytics platforms that enable them to model the impacts from different points of view within the organisation can prove invaluable in designing a more dynamic, adaptable workforce, allowing the forecast of both workforce demand and supply and linking these so that it can deliver on its overall plan.

A great example of this is when an established business finds its digital sales are rapidly outpacing instore sales and that its digital offerings are changing how customers are shopping instore. Data from various touchpoints in the business – digital, instore, via apps, for example, may unlock competitive advantage if the organisation is able to access and leverage that data to re-design how the workforce is deployed.

Planning and analytics tools enable teams across the business to examine and then model a range of scenarios from the view points of the divisions that will be impacted. For example,  the business may need to shift headcount into new parts of the business and model how investment may need to change, then consider the financial impost of how teams may need to work differently and their time accounted for in project-based work.

Notably, despite the unprecedented change currently underway, fewer than one in five organisations are making the most of analytics that can adjust to the necessary conditions for success.

The big picture and the granular view

Organisations need to move faster and have more flexibility to stay ahead of market changes, the imperative – irrespective of size, industry or geography – to shift to more flexibly and adaptive approaches to financial and operational planning is clear. To enable them to plan the impact of changes in how they operate, they need line-of-sight view of both the bigger picture and the more granular impacts on their workforces and operations.

Being able to generate multidimensional perspectives for different department heads as well as the executive team is highly valuable – and arguably necessary — for longer-term planning and near-term responsiveness when the market is disrupted, as has happened with COVID-19. The ability to examine financial and operational planning across an organisation’s scope of capabilities such as strategy, organisational and employee experience design, sourcing, people analytics, core change and project management skills involves asking key questions about whether the organisation has the breadth and depth of analytic and modelling capabilities to design and deliver the enterprise that will ensure competitiveness into the future by realigning its resources.

Setting the benchmarks

Analytic and modelling capabilities are therefore key. For organisations keen to plan and forecast at scale and at speed, the process starts with clarity of financial impacts and understanding the business drivers, and then engaging a strong coalition of stakeholders across HR, Operations, Finance, and the central corporate planning function to augment existing practices or redesign them with appropriate tools and methodologies.

Many organisations then benefit from implementing sophisticated workforce planning and analytics capability, which provides a view that can cut and connect across the business and will enable it to better gain efficiencies by modelling the business-wide impacts of the potential workforce changes.  

When it comes to facilitating organisational agility, planning and analytics tools can be a powerful way for organisations to design flex into their operations and help solve financial and operational planning challenges. For instance, instead of manually working to reduce the number of times teams pull data from disparate, siloed systems, analytics solutions can automate  the integration of relevant data together from disparate sources and provide a planning ecosystem to model and collaborate, providing insight to teams across the business.

Collaboration is the critical force behind agile organisations

As organisations seek greater flexibility in how they work and adopt agile methodologies into project delivery, planning and analytics tools enable the organisation to model costs and headcount very differently as teams move out of the traditional ‘silo by department’ and into squads, tribes, and multi-disciplined project teams.

However, while there are benefits to creating cross-functional project teams to drive change, harnessing the data across business units that enable the financial modelling and scenario building can be challenging. Often there are multiple business systems such as HR platforms, ERPs, and other operational tools that provide some level of analytics that is siloed into the department they serve. The ability to pull that data into an organisational view is essential for designing greater agility that leadership seeks.

Collaboration is a critical function in an agile organisation and vital for ensuring closer alignment between HR, finance and operations as workforce needs to become more closely aligned with its strategic objectives. Organisations that invest time and effort in communicating how the change impacts will be managed and how their teams will benefit from analytics projects typically see higher levels of engagement from their people, and benefit from the strategic outcomes across the organisation as a whole.

The discipline around the change and communication effort can support the adoption of the broader analytics capability as it rolls out, particularly in how it will benefit the people as much as the business as they learn how to utilise and leverage the insights that planning analytics tools can deliver.

PMsquare Asia has delivered Workforce Planning and Integrated Planning solutions to both mid-size and enterprise customers in Australia’s as well as some of the world’s largest global brands. We partner with IBM to deliver Planning Analytics with Watson across many aspects of business performance management. For more information about our workforce management and planning capability, please contact us.