If your organization is like the majority of others, you spend what seems like an interminable amount of time in yearly planning meetings discussing spreadsheets, crunching numbers, prioritizing line items, trying to foresee potential opportunities, and attempting to estimate how much the year will cost. Usually, when trying to make plans, we look at our work past. How many courses did we create the previous year? What number will we produce this year? What tasks will we carry out internally? Will we have to outsource some of the projects? Which of our resources is most important? This type of strategic planning is conventional or traditional. We adjust the percentages up or down based on the past to inform the future, and then we finalize our plan for the year.

Although it may have been the practice in organizations all over the world for aeons, annual planning is becoming outdated in a world where technology advances more quickly than business. It is time to abandon convention and adopt a fresh approach to planning that spends more time focusing on maximizing productivity and flexibility. One that does not need you to waste time attempting to nail down every little detail just to constrain yourself by a strategy that leaves no room for error. Organizations need to “tear apart the traditional budgeting process, become more dynamic, and emphasize critical managerial roles individually,” according to a Wall Street Journal article. So what does that mean?

Dynamic Planning

A technique called “dynamic planning” embodies a set of management and leadership ideas that help businesses or teams to respond as quickly as possible to rapidly shifting market conditions. Decentralizing financial stewardship to front-line managers, who are in charge of the majority of the organization’s costs, will help health systems foster a continuous improvement mindset. Additionally, it entails more value-added resource allocation and real-time feedback so that leadership can eliminate obstacles and address shortfalls. It aims to consider the larger picture while planning and strikes a balance between strategy and flexibility to create a comprehensive, responsible plan for the coming year. However, it also necessitates that you review that plan regularly—possibly once a quarter—to make sure it is still relevant today. This applies to whether you are a large corporation or a functional team like HR.

Dynamic Planning goes beyond finances. If organizational learning priorities change, you will need to be able to revisit those priorities and adjust the learning requirements of your team. A dynamic strategy enables staff to take calculated risks, seize unanticipated opportunities, act quickly in the face of challenges, adopt new technologies, and implement novel concepts—all for the benefit of the company. Financial stewardship is decentralized in organizations, which encourages workers to concentrate on improving the effectiveness and quality of each decision. Large-scale, low-hanging opportunities can be found through typical, organizational-wide cost reduction programs, but this seldom happens again. Organizations guarantee year-over-year expense savings by empowering managers to spot and take care of tiny opportunities every day that, taken together, have a significant impact on the bottom line.

Dynamic Workforce Planning

At least some companies are being encouraged to investigate the possibility of employing dynamic workforce planning to achieve a competitive advantage by market unpredictability and the pace of internal company and external market change. For many years, the manufacturing sector and its larger supply chain have used workforce planning, also known as headcount management, which matches labour demand and supply based on a specific budget. It has then grown into other markets over time, such as retail, technology, telecoms, energy, and hotels. According to Helen Poitevin, VP for human capital management at Gartner, workforce planning has mostly remained a specialized role that is managed by a small team of experts at companies with 5,000 or more people. Smaller players frequently rely on manual spreadsheets to perform their calculations, in contrast to these larger organizations that frequently use workforce-planning software. However, Poitevin predicts that between 5 and 10% of the market will soon adopt dynamic workforce planning systems, its more advanced relative.

This strategy involves automating the development of strategic workforce plans that can be swiftly altered depending on various data inputs to match operational needs. Additionally, it is intended to regularly assess how well these strategies are working and to make necessary revisions in response to shifts in the supply or demand for talent. According to Poitevin, “The more dynamic you go, the more you need relevant skills and appropriate data, which can be hard to find as HR systems are sometimes inconsistently implemented across geographies. But while most organisations will know which job categories exist and how many people they have, querying skills data is where it’s really challenging.”

The issue here is that gathering, and evaluating skill data requires a lot of labour, and that such data soon becomes outdated. This indicates that historically, the drawbacks of taking this course have outweighed the advantages. The situation has also been made worse by a general lack of investment in data analysis and modelling abilities.

Understanding Skills Gap

Many businesses right now recognize the capacity to identify skills gaps and take better action in response to them. As a result, this component of dynamic workforce planning is the one that will probably lead to wider uptake of such systems. Employers who “have lost market share and are trying to regain a competitive advantage through talent in a more strategic way” will find dynamic workforce planning to be of particular interest and value, according to Betsy Summers, principal analyst for the Future of Work and Human Capital Management at Forrester. According to Summers, one benefit of doing this is that using a dynamic workforce planning system enables them to “connect the dots between business strategy and skills and roles, and translate that into different cost scenarios to help answer questions like: how much would it cost and how long would it take to buy or hire those skills? Build those skills by upskilling or reskilling? Borrow those skills using contingent labour or consultancies, or ‘bot’ those skills by outsourcing them to technology?”

Final Thoughts

Your next project will be influenced by your ability to explain what is working and what is not, as well as your comprehension of why things turned out the way they did. It demonstrates to management that you are paying attention to what matters and that you are capable of leading the team in the appropriate direction and changing course swiftly if necessary. With dynamic planning, you and your team are free to exercise strategic thinking more frequently. It promotes strategic thinking whenever feasible.

With dynamic planning, you may take care of urgent issues while maintaining alignment with important long-term goals. In reaction to alterations and disruptions, you might modify your plans and rearrange your priorities. It continuously connects strategy to execution and produces helpful data that might aid in decision-making, such as the most effective approach to reallocate resources, improve hiring, or boost sales. As a result, managers and staff are given the freedom to take calculated risks, grasp opportunities, react swiftly to challenges, adopt new technology, and put new ideas into practice while being aware of how their choices will affect the company as a whole.