The Opportunity
Our client is a global professional body for accountants and has a presence in over 100 countries. It is growing quickly, particularly in its developing markets, but takes very seriously its stance on risk and the need to be seen as an exemplar for financial probity. They asked us to help them design and implement a Strategic Workforce Planning framework to help them to better manage their most important resource – their people.
The Tricordant Approach
Our client challenged us to work with them in a very collaborative way; to involve as many people as we could in the design process and to take into account the many (and sometimes contradictory) different views from across the organisation. Most importantly, they wanted a solution that was as simple as it could be, easy to understand and easy to learn. Naturally, as a professional body representing accountants, the project needed to meet their exacting standards in governance and accountability.
Working closely with the small project team we soon recognised the importance of integrating strategic workforce planning with the established processes of financial planning, business planning, and strategic change initiatives. The project team soon realised that the stakeholder map was large and complex and this emphasised the importance of collaboration alongside simplicity and pragmatism. What would be needed would be a simple toolset that used the information that was available and the knowledge and skills of senior managers around their own lines of business. We helped the client not only with the design of processes and toolsets, but also to create a simple handbook written in their own recently revised “House Style”.
The Outcomes
The outcome of the project was a simple, straightforward and pragmatic approach to strategic workforce planning which has enhanced the organisations capability for forward planning in way which is integrated between Financial planning, Business planning, the planning of major change programmes, and People planning.