No Budget? No Problem!

With the uncertainty of the global economy, many companies are up against substantial financial challenges. Others are hesitant to approve long-term budgets because the short-term is unstable. With a need for increased ability to flex the workforce up and down rapidly or for global companies, the need to shift jobs into lower cost countries, strategic workforce planning capabilities have become a priority. For many companies, with these economic uncertainties and financial challenges come a lack of budget to implement strategic workforce planning. This article describes how to become creative with global strategic workforce planning with no budget.

I should be absolutely truthful and tell you that I did spend $1,995 for the project I will describe today. If I’d had access to about $70,000, it would have gone faster, certainly, and would have had more flash, but I accomplished the same goal for far less money. So this story serves to provide hope to all business leaders who feel they can’t provide value with workforce planning when they have little to no budget. Use my story as a guideline and learn how to get creative.

Where shall I begin? I sat in my office wondering how I could provide greater value to one of my global customers. I had established workforce models for quite a few countries for this company but lacked an overall platform for global sharing of information, knowledge and wisdom. In the absence of a budget, what was I to do?

It was time to get creative. What did I have available to me in the absence of a large budget? I had time and I had good business relationships. What could I accomplish with these?

The first thing I needed to truly enhance workforce planning globally was a global source of employee information. With five global regions, I was always having to tap into multiple data sets and joining a queue of data requests in each global region. That certainly wasn’t going to serve me in the long run. I needed to get this information into one place. There was a project in its infancy which would put these systems together in the long-term, but I could see that it would take several years. I’m not that patient. So, drawing on my relationships with global HR experts inside this company, we selected the fields from each global system of employee information that we needed for our immediate goals. With a little pleading, a few dedicated IT employees in one global region volunteered to use any spare time they had to “echo” our desired information into one temporary global database each night until our long-term solution could be installed. To these gentlemen, we owe a great deal and I thank them tremendously for their efforts.

Next, and this is where I spent the tiny budget of less than $2000, I purchased a piece of data visualization software so I could build interactive workforce planning tools such as workforce forecasts, assessments of risk to the global leadership, assessment of employee mobility, workforce costing, demographic dashboards and assorted scenario plans. But sadly, these could be accessed only by the few people for whom they were built. It was time to share these on a much larger scale.

With no budget to launch a fancy server of, well, anything, I needed a free solution which could store these tools and provide the company with the ability to control who could access them. Workforce planning tools, as you can imagine, tend to contain rather sensitive information related to future strategic business moves and employee trends. As luck would have it, the company had an enterprise-wide installation of SharePoint. For those not familiar with SharePoint, it is a web-based platform which allows for file sharing and a variety of collaboration features. This software could house the tools and allow us to set the security levels down to the country level, division, organization code or all the way down to the individual. Having figured out how to program some SharePoint features previously, I managed to create a global site which could store the tools, communication streams and best practice documents.

So what can we learn from this brief, high-level story? You don’t need a large budget to extract value from global strategic workforce planning. You need to get creative and leverage what you have.

Tracey led the global strategic workforce planning initiative for FedEx Express World Headquarters. In addition, she led a variety of global, strategic HR projects where expertise in data-driven decision making was required. She is now an independent consultant advising clients on HR Analytics and Strategic Workforce Planning.

Tracey is the author of "Strategic Workforce Planning: Guidance & Back-up Plans," “Data Driven Decision Making for Small Businesses” and “Changing HR: The Little e-Book of HR Strategy Quick Wins.” She often speaks at conferences and seminars on the topics of strategic workforce planning and HR analytics.

Tracey holds degrees in Mathematics, Engineering and Business from universities in Canada and the U.S. She has over 20 years of experience in the areas of Human Resources, Supply Chain and Engineering. She was born in the U.K. and has worked in both Canada and the U.S. Her company, Numerical Insights LLC, helps clients make better business decisions by utilizing strategic, data-driven techniques to assess value and reduce risk.

You can find Tracey on the web at:

Web Site: www.numericalinsights.com

Email: publications@numericalinsights.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/numericalinsights
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/tracey-smith/0/523/77a
Twitter: @ninsights