Thursday, October 10, 2019

How to Make Strategic IT Workforce Planning

The scientific and dynamic IT workforce planning is important to focus on achieving strategic goals, motivate employees to achieve more, encourage growth mindset, and build high performance teams.

Workforce management is an important process which underpins the organization’s collective human capability and differentiated business competency. With fast-paced changes, hyper-diversity, exponential growth of information, and fierce competitions, the workforce planning and management has to become highly analytical and systematic.


Although it does not mean that you treat people as "objects," it does mean that whatever workforce management programs you run needs to be smoothly aligned with the business’s strategic goals and improve the overall organizational performance and maturity. Here are three-step strategic IT workforce planning scenario:

Start by identifying the strategic goals of the IT organization (especially those affected by trends): The strategic organizational goal must comport a vision for a better state. It is a matter of figuring out "where are you now," and "where you want to be." In general, a goal is hard to articulate. IT leaders must consider the business relevant factors in order to create effective strategic planning, goal-setting, and make the seamless alignment.

IT-enabled business capability mapping allow you to first understand the strategic business goals, your customers and what they value. It’s also important to align IT functional goals with the strategic goals of the entire company and from there, determine the various IT team’s goals to meet the strategic goals of the IT organization. IT management needs to make sure having a goal that has the business purpose first, as well as getting people evolved. An ambitious goal-setting is a driving factor, stretches up the team and boosts employees’ morality, also defines the timeline, resources, and benefits clearly.

Then, assess the responsibilities and skills required to achieve strategic IT goals: IT management has to make an objective assessment of IT strengths and weaknesses, IT team strengths and weaknesses, as well as the responsibilities and skills required to achieve strategic goals. Strategic workforce planning and management today is far more than just putting a ‘strategic’ label on the term. It’s an entirely new approach that uses information technology tools and resources often weren’t available in the past.

However, in practice, there are some pitfalls in IT workforce planning and management. For example, sometimes, they hire only for immediate need, not pay enough attention to the long-term business perspective. Other times, they look too narrowly at a specific problem to solve, partly because that is the way funding is allocated, lack of a broader view of dynamic IT workforce planning and strategy goals for the long term. The strategic workforce planning requires the collaboration among executives, talent managers and information professionals, access to and better understanding of data and analytics, apply advanced IT solutions to integrate disparate planning sources and gain a comprehensive knowledge of the organization.


Finally, define who you need to have those responsibilities and skills – talent: The digital workforce has a multitude of varieties. In reality, people are always the weakest link in organizations for either strategy management or change management. To keep IT relevant and transform IT from a support center to a strategic business partner, IT talent today often needs to have both technical skills and business acumen for making sustainable IT-business relationship and solving complex business problems effectively.

IT needs both strategic generalists with business insight and dedicated specialists with technical excellence. Thus, when assessing talent, the dynamic and balanced approaches are needed to understand individual talent, team strength, as well as how to put the right people with the right capabilities to access the right information for solving the right problems. It is critical to select people with growth mindset and learning skills, evaluate both individual and team performance on how effectively they can improve the quality of products/services, solve problems creatively, explore their skill/capability/potential, and improve their learning agility to bring IT to the next level of maturity.

There is no doubt that IT plays a critical role in creating business advantage. The scientific and dynamic IT workforce planning is important to focus on achieving strategic goals, motivate employees to achieve more, encourage growth mindset, build high performance teams, and create synergy for driving IT to reach the next level of organizational maturity.


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