Lean but Agile: Rethink Workforce Planning and Gain a True Competitive Edge - Hardcover

Rothwell, William; Graber, Jim; McCormick, Neil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814417779 ISBN 13: 9780814417775

Verlag: AMACOM, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

As organizations strive to meet stringent budgets, the mandate to produce greater results with fewer resources is no longer sufficient. Rather than accepting less, managers and executives must strive for better--evaluating every process and every role and doing away with assumptions about how work gets done and who does it in order to streamline processes and maximize efficiency. William Rothwell, who was honored with the ASTD Distinguished Contribution Award in Workplace Learning and Peformance, presents a system for analyzing work and selecting the ideal combination of cost-effective resources--employees, consultants, contractors, temporary workers, and vendors--to accomplish it. Lean but Agile does this by teaching readers to focus on outcomes and work backwards--exploring the introduction, implementation, and management of lean work and agile staffing methods that will produce those outcomes. You’ll also learn about advantageous changes in hiring, goal-setting, learning and development, and performance management, and the fundamental role technology can play in transforming your processes. Packed with practical advice, examples, guides, worksheets, diagrams, and metrics, Lean but Agile will help leaders, managers, and human resource professionals optimize their workforces while still achieving superior results.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

WILLIAM J. ROTHWELL, PH.D., SPHR, CPLP FELLOW, is Professor of Workplace Learning and Performance at Pennsylvania State University and President of Rothwell Associates, a premier human resources consulting firm.

JAMES GRABER is Managing Director of Business Decisions, Inc., a talent management technology and software company. NEIL MCCORMICK, a Senior Vice President at Talent2, has 30 years' experience in international management, human resources and consulting.

NEIL MCCORMICK, a Senior Vice President at Talent2, has 30 years' experience in international management, human resources and consulting.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

If your organization is like many others in the current economic climate, you’re being asked to do more with less and maximize efficiency under the constraints of an increasingly stringent budget. In your efforts to creatively cut costs while maintaining quality service and production, you may have tried using a variety of alternative workers such as contingent, contractor, and temporary workers; relying on “permanent part-time” staff or teleworkers; or increasing overtime among your existing workers. You may even have resorted to outsourcing, offshoring, or downsizing.

Today, leading the pack, or just remaining competitive, does require a significant shift in the way we do business. However, many of the current efforts are focused just on cutting costs, and they run the risk of also reducing organization capability. There’s no getting around it: If you want to optimize your workforce and still achieve superior results, you need a calculated, systematic effort to plan for work results and the types of workers needed to do the work.

Lean but Agile provides you and your organization with a complete system for clarifying and focusing on measurable, desired outcomes and working backward to design work and staff to achieve those outcomes. Packed with practical advice, examples, guides, worksheets, diagrams, and metrics, the book gives you powerful strategies for streamlining your staff and the work they do...all while remaining nimble, fast-moving, and ready to cope with dynamic change. Lean but Agile gives you the eye-opening strategies you need to:

• Reengineer how work is done to impact the number and kind of people needed

• Build a lean and agile talent pool

• Identify and assess the methods you currently use to staff for work

• Adopt new management strategies for dealing with the many different, coexisting methods of staffing for and doing work

• Build organizational commitment to Lean but Agile work and staffing, and make the business case to senior leaders and other stakeholders

In addition, the book includes information on the HR audit as well as a sample workforce report depicting how an organization may gather and maintain useful workforce information.

Smart organizations need to be able to rapidly change direction in staffing based on customer demands, competitor strategies, innovation, pricing, and other considerations. This book contains a powerful system for staying lean while delivering the superior products, services, and results that customers and shareholders demand.

WILLIAM J. ROTHWELL is professor of Workplace Learning and Performance at The Pennsylvania State University and President of Rothwell & Associates, a business consultancy.

JAMES GRABER is Managing Director of Business Decisions, Inc., a talent-management technology and software company.

NEIL McCORMICK, a Senior Vice President at Talent2, has 30 years’ experience in international management, human resources, and consulting.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CHAPTER 1

AN INTRODUCTION TO LEAN BUT AGILE WORK AND WORKFORCE PLANNING

What is your organization doing to hold down employment expenses

while simultaneously ensuring that work results meet or exceed customer

requirements? How is your organization experimenting with new

ways of staffing the work to be done while also achieving the best results?

How well is your organization planning systematically for the quantity and

quality of people needed to achieve work results in line with customer

needs? Read the following vignettes and describe how your organization

would meet the challenges you find in each. If your organization has ways to

solve all of these problems, then perhaps it already has a way to plan com-

prehensively and systematically for work results and ways for workers to

achieve those results. But if your organization cannot solve most of the

problems presented here, then your leaders may want to consider a Lean

but Agile approach to planning for the work and workforce.

* * *

Traditional Views of Work Planning and Workforce Planning

As the preceding vignettes illustrate, employers globally are struggling with

how to achieve the best work results. Driven by a need to lower costs while

increasing productivity, they are not always following traditional ways of

planning the work and the workforce. But what are these traditional ap-

proaches? What is traditional work planning? What is traditional workforce

planning?

Traditional Work Planning

Traditional ways of thinking about planning for work have their roots in the

industrial age. An organizational structure (organization chart) is estab-

lished to allocate responsibilities for various work activities. These activities,

in turn, are then broken down further into departments, work groups, jobs,

and tasks.

Traditional thinking about work planning emphasizes the work process,

that is, how the work is done. Little or no attention is devoted to clarifying in

detail the measurable work outcomes desired by customers or other stake-

holders who care about the work. In some circles, work planning is actually

confused with project planning, which is just one way to organize the work

to be accomplished. The important point to understand, however, is that the

workforce needed to achieve desired work results depends on how the work

is done and the desired outcomes. Employers are already experimenting

with new ways to get work done. Those experiments affect the workforce

needed to achieve work results.

Traditional Workforce Planning

Much has been written about workforce planning in recent years. Indeed,

workforce planning has garnered far more attention than has work planning.

One reason is that many employers are keenly aware that labor costs

are a major expense in doing business. Modern accounting methods treat

labor as a cost of doing business while ignoring the critical importance of

human creative talent as the only active ingredient that can serve as a cat-

alyst to add value to land, finances, technology, or other assets.

Traditional workforce planning follows the logic of economics. As demand

for products or services increases, it creates a demand for labor to make

the products or deliver the services. Labor demand refers to the quantity

and quality of people needed to meet production or service delivery re-

quirements. Labor supply refers to the quantity and quality of people cur-

rently employed by the organization. As labor demand increases as a func-

tion of production or service demand, more people are needed to meet the

demand. In short, a larger supply of people is needed.

But this relationship is not precise. Sometimes the number of workers

affects productivity directly. In other cases, such as managerial work, man-

agers can oversee increasing employees until a tipping point is reached.

To complicate matters, sometimes the quality of workers affects productivity.

A few talented people may outperform an army.

The traditional approach to workforce planning, based in economics,

has some distinct disadvantages. The first disadvantage is that future labor

demand is forecasted based on past experience. In short, economists tend

to assume that the same quantity and quality of people will be needed to

achieve future results as were needed to achieve past results. Unfortunate-

ly, technology and other productivity breakthroughs can actually

change the quantity and quality of people needed in the future. The second

disadvantage is that economists struggle with the notion of differences

in individual talent. Not all people are equally productive, or even

equally productive in the same ways. Some people are simply more produc-

tive than others, and talents—understood to mean personal strengths

in this context—differ on an individual basis. Some research suggests that

the difference between the average and the most productive worker can be

as high as eleven times.

Many methods are available to conduct workforce planning. They are

drawn from quantitatively focused approaches from statistics, econometrics,

or operations research and from qualitatively focused approaches to

problem solving. Few organizations undertake any form of systematic,

comprehensive workforce planning. In fact, one study found that as many

as two-thirds of U.S. employers do no comprehensive workforce planning.1

Instead, jobs are typically approved in many organizations on a case-bycase

basis as vacancies become available or as work demand increases. The

result: The collective competencies and talents of the entire...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: AMACOM
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0814417779
• ISBN 13: 9780814417775
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: HarperCollins; https://harpercollins.co.uk; ; "The News Building 1 London Bridge Street,"; London; SE1 9GF; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar