Some years ago I was asked to complete a Workforce Planning review of an organisation that was considering adding another 10% to its funded positions. This was due to a combination of current ‘in-play’ projects, a significant pipeline of work or variations and the potential of federal funding in minor ‘shovel-ready’ projects which would offset the nascent Global Financial Crisis (GFC) thus keeping people in employment.

I was brought in to bring some Workforce Planning discipline to the expected increase in numbers with an expectation that I would make some recommendations around recruitment and retention.

I’ve had a long background in the area of resource planning and given that this organisation was a project oriented organisation I thought that a look at the utilisation data would be an effective way to identify the mission-critical roles in the organisation while also narrowing in on the people or infrastructure that was causing bottlenecks.

The organisation struggled to get me access to live project and HRIS data so after pouring over masses of hard-copy material and chatting to many of the highly technical staff in the first month it soon became apparent that the data from some projects did not match the data from other projects. Humans are still pretty good at pattern recognition and it’s a KSAOC (Knowledge, Skill, Attribute & Other Capability as per the Naomi Bloom definition) that I take pride in possessing.

You see, data that looks too good is just that…

What had occurred was that in an effort to meet the increasing project requirements pre-GFC the organisation had flown in approximately 30 technical staff (or approximately 10% of the APAC workforce) from one of its under-utilised Asian offices and setup a separate office for them in an Australian state that was undergoing a mining/infrastructure/energy boom. Part of the conditions of that large project team included continued Asian management, free accommodation, per-diem and a % bonus above the local staff for work-output.

With local conditions deteriorating and organisations at all levels looking to cut costs especially in the mining sector the Australian market which was so robust in the mid 2000’s looked decidedly shaky in the closing stages of that decade. Transformation projects in the mining, energy and infrastructure states were the first to be curtailed or wound back.

As the boom projects wound back the Asian team was given overflow work from the other programs of work. According to the technical staff allocated to those non-boom work-packages the work completed by the sub-continent staff was slower and required more re-work than that of its embedded staff. The Manager explained that this was due to a combination of up-skilling on the new work and the different standards in place for each region. Given that this was a reasonable argument this was accepted at the senior management level.

Yet, when I looked at the historical project and payroll data coming from the deployed Asian team the data was perfect from day one, indicating that when they had transitioned from one area of work to another including a regional change of standard they had no problem. I then moved from macro data to micro data and found richer anomalies, like work-tasks which would be allocated one-hour in Hong Kong or Sydney taking six-hours for this team.

To use a term much-favoured by a former boss of mine, the team was sand-bagging, in the sense that it was pretending to be busy to fool management that it was still required (as were the perks that came with the requirement). Due to the silo approach from Operations (project management/data), HR (payroll/bonuses) and Information Technology (data) no one in management had picked up the patterns in the story.

I subsequently presented my findings to the executive along with my recommendations that:

• No special recruitment or retention activities be undertaken; and
• That the Asian team be re-deployed back to its home location.

After a stunned reception my findings were reviewed, found to be factual and implemented with significant cost savings in recruitment/retention activities, deployment costs, underutilisation and payroll.

This story and one which I find often repeated in other organisations is rich in Workforce Planning lessons.

One of the most important from an organisational perspective is:

“What is the business question or problem you want answered or solved”?

Alternately, you can go back to the project management maxim of remember the requirement and forget about the solution, that will come via the process (solution design) at a later stage.

Another lesson and in my view equally as important is that Workforce Planning is becoming a more accepted discipline within the organisation and often embedded or linked to HR. If you want to build effective Workforce Planning disciplines into your organisation you will need to have an integrated full-business approach though and that includes your core businesses and support organisations.



Shane Granger is a journeyman Workforce-Planner, pseudo-intellectual, neo-Taylorist & occasional writer. Shane manages the Regional Workforce Planning LinkedIn forum promoting better outcomes for all global regional centres. Shane can be lauded or abused on Twitter @gmggranger