Monitoring: What Comes After the Plan?

"Everyone is a candidate - either for head hunting, to move to another role internally, or to leave by their own volition."

That was something that a customer told me during our discussion on strategic workforce planning (SWP) the other day.

I'd never heard anyone articulate SWP quite that way before, but it’s a message that really stuck with me.

The plan is only the starting point

Historically, SWP forecasts have been built around a static headcount and a fixed budget, projected over a long time horizon, with a strategic framework layered on top to close identified gaps. That process is still a fundamental part of planning and remains integral to organisational health.  Any practitioner who has built these plans knows how much time and investment it takes to get right.

But a static headcount and budget were only ever a snapshot of the truth at one point in time. Organisations move quickly, and both planned and unplanned changes happen continuously throughout the periods we plan for. An action plan built on a point-in-time snapshot can go stale fast and sometimes before it's even been socialised across the business.

This is why it is important for organisations to keep moving toward continuous planning cycles. Not just planning more often, but actively reviewing whether the plan already in place is working. Planning three to five years ahead is still critical for setting an organisation up for success, but because of how quickly the world of work is changing, both executives and HRBPs are increasingly focused on the here and now. Once a plan is in place, leadership stops asking whether the plan is right and starts focussing on performance.  

In practice, that means two very direct questions:

• Are we closing the skill and capability gaps we identified?

• How are these actions tracking against our budget?

Answering those questions is harder than it should be. In practice, both questions get answered the same way: someone pulls headcount and cost from one system, the planned targets from another, and reconciles them into something leadership can read. That reconciliation is itself a time investment.

The only sustainable path is a continuous reporting structure, which itself is only possible through continuous monitoring of your strategic plans. That's what drives accountability across the organisation and provides the jumping off point to pinpoint issues in the execution of your strategy.  

Introducing Monitoring

Monitoring is the first step toward answering leadership questions with truth and live data that can be grounded in your actual people and cost records rather than guesswork.

Starting today, TalentNeuron customers can use Monitoring to:

• Upload monitoring data using the same familiar flow as your master data uploads and give each import a unique name so you can track progress over time.

• View a Monitoring Summary and a Monitoring Analytics page.

• Track two core KPIs against your plan: FTE (actual headcount vs. planned demand) and Cost (actual vs. planned workforce cost).

It's a first step and not the full picture, but it's the foundation for showing whether the plan you proposed is starting to close the gaps you identified, whether that's through redeploying existing talent or new hiring.

Want to see Monitoring in action? Request a demo with our team.