Build a Data-Driven Workforce Plan: A Critical CIO Exercise
Take the guesswork out of your IT workforce equation.
- Talent shortages, budget cuts, and quickly evolving skill needs are just a few among many barriers faced by IT leaders looking to staff their organization.
- A chief barrier to addressing all the above is simply lack of time and expertise. Between IT’s focus on hard skills, and the division of leaders’ time among competing priorities, the skill of workforce planning rarely gets priority in training or in time.
- Without adequate time and training, IT is stuck in reactive mode – struggling to fill positions and failing to take advantage of data on workforce efficiency.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Info-Tech’s step-by-step approach helps you consolidate and organize your workforce inputs – from business demand to current workforce efficiency – into your own unique “workforce equation” so you don’t become overwhelmed.
Impact and Result
- By automating critical analysis steps, we enable you to take into account key insights about your own staff and explore multiple scenarios for skill sourcing.
- Our approach lets you simplify complex data collection and direct your focus to making decisions where you can bring the most value.
Workshop: Build a Data-Driven Workforce Plan: A Critical CIO Exercise
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Establish Scope
The Purpose
Establish scope and goals.
Key Benefits Achieved
Ensure project’s success can be tracked with metrics.
Activities
Outputs
Determine scope and collect information sources
- List of in-scope roles for workforce plan
- List of documentation, data, and stakeholders
Estimate IT demand
Module 2: Define Demand and Supply
The Purpose
Accurately define IT demand and supply based on real-world data.
Key Benefits Achieved
Ensure your estimates are as accurate as possible to make your workforce plan realistic to your unique environment.
Activities
Outputs
Estimate IT demand (continued)
- Preliminary FTE gap analysis for in-scope roles
Refine IT supply gap and identify critical gaps
Module 3: Build Workforce Plan
The Purpose
Make decisions on how to fill critical FTE gaps.
Key Benefits Achieved
Using a data-driven approach helps you accurately estimate the cost and time required to fill key gaps.
Activities
Outputs
Decide on a sourcing strategy for key gaps
- Refined FTE gap analysis for in-scope roles
- Priority gaps identified
Build your workforce plan
Module 4: Finalize Workforce Plan
The Purpose
Ensure your workforce plan takes into account all data available and prepare to communicate to stakeholders.
Key Benefits Achieved
Presenting your workforce plan to key decision makers relies on having a sound analysis presented in a clear and concise way.
Activities
Outputs
Build your workforce plan (continued)
- Sourcing decisions made to fill key gaps
- Executive-ready workforce plan presentation
Create a communication strategy
- Communication plan
Build a Data-Driven Workforce Plan: A Critical CIO Exercise
Take the guesswork out of your IT workforce equation
Executive Summary
Your ChallengeIT continues to struggle to hire the right talent. As inflation drives operating and labor costs up, IT leaders must become more strategic with workforce planning. The typical approach of backfilling vacant roles is not sufficient at the current rate of business change and technological evolution in today’s difficult talent marketplace. When essential roles like Security, Enterprise Architecture, and Data Analytics remain difficult and expensive to fill, how can IT leaders find the right balance of cost vs. value when it comes to their staff? | Common ObstaclesTalent shortages, budget cuts, and quickly evolving skill needs are just a few among many barriers faced by IT leaders looking to staff their organization. A chief barrier to addressing all the above is simply lack of time and expertise. Between IT’s focus on hard skills, and the division of leaders’ time among competing priorities, the skill of workforce planning rarely gets priority in training or in time. Without adequate time and training, IT is stuck in reactive mode – struggling to fill positions and failing to take advantage of data on workforce efficiency. | Info-Tech’s ApproachInfo-Tech’s step-by-step approach helps you consolidate and organize your workforce inputs – from business demand to current workforce efficiency – into your own unique “workforce equation” so you don’t become overwhelmed. By automating critical analysis steps, we enable you to take into account key insights about your own staff and explore multiple scenarios for skill sourcing. Our approach lets you simplify complex data collection and direct your focus to making decisions where you can bring the most value. |
Info-Tech Insight
Your workforce plan is more than a projected headcount. It must include considerations of work efficiency and talent sourcing. These factors come together into your own “workforce equation.” Info-Tech helps you automate the analysis so you can account for all the factors and data that will determine your success.
Your challenge
Workforce expenses constitute up to 70% of an organization’s operating costs (Paycor, 2022), yet IT continues to struggle to hire the right talent.
Over half of IT organizations experience significant difficulty hiring for the most in-demand roles. Multiple barriers account for this, including:
- Availability of talent.
- Increased competition for the right hires through a rapidly globalizing talent marketplace.
- Unsustainable salary increases for in-demand specialists.
- Extended time-to-hire.
Although a possible recession and hybrid work arrangements may be bringing about an expansion of the hiring pool, this alone will be insufficient to address IT’s challenges to hire.
Hardest-to-fill roles in IT
Info-Tech Talent Trends 2022 Survey
Common obstacles
Workforce planning is more than hiring enough people to get the job done.
Securing headcount is only one step in building a workforce plan that will sustainably support the strategy of IT and the organization. In addition to allocating work, a workforce plan must account for:
- Financial pressure: investment in human capital is often the first cut made in a cost-cutting situation; a workforce plan is also a business case for hiring and retaining the talent you need.
- Sourcing opportunities: hiring may not be the fastest or most cost-effective way to fill skill gaps. A comprehensive workforce plan weighs multiple sourcing options, including training, outsourcing, and automation.
- Time to hire: with the current state of the IT talent marketplace, failing to account for the time it takes to hire and bring a new employee up to full productivity can make the difference between meeting your strategic objectives and failing to justify the value of IT within the organization.
- Unicorn employee syndrome: without a critical skills gap analysis, organizations tend to look for exact replacements of former employees, leading to time and money spent seeking out skill combinations that are no longer optimal for the organizational strategy.
Alternative sourcing avenues can mitigate skills shortages and financial pressures
37% of IT departments are outsourcing roles to fill internal skill shortages.
— Info-Tech Talent Trends 2022 Survey
IT’s biggest challenge
Workforce planning is only one part of an IT leader’s busy job, yet the hiring market is one of the most challenging.
Among all of IT’s responsibilities, workforce planning is just one, and never seen as the top priority. Although it is essential to enabling business strategy, workforce planning, along with other people-oriented initiatives, are typically viewed as having a limited, intra-department benefit. As such, training on how to conduct it effectively is hard to come by for IT leaders despite the IT talent market being one of the most challenging of any industry.
Info-Tech’s methodology addresses this problem by consolidating what is often a complex and convoluted process into a simple step-by-step deliverable. By automating the analysis, you are able to consolidate multiple inputs into a clear set of guidelines, forming your department’s own unique “workforce equation.”
In IT, training focuses on technical skills, to the exclusion of soft skills, including management and leadership.
Info-Tech Talent Trends 2022 Survey
Data-Driven Workforce Planning
Recommended prerequisites
A workforce plan is only as good as the goals it supports, and the data it builds on.
| IT StrategyYour IT strategy is an essential input to your workforce plan. Simply refilling vacant roles is not enough. You must understand how demands on the IT function will evolve with changing business needs. An up-to-date IT strategy is the only way to ensure the workforce plan you build will be able to support all the operations and initiatives IT will need to undertake not just now, but also in the future. |
| IT Organizational DesignTo accurately estimate the roles and skills required to enact an IT strategy, you need to know how strategic and operational tasks will be performed – what skills are needed on which teams. If you don’t have an up-to-date, strategy-aligned operating model in place, you risk investing your limited workforce resources into the wrong roles, or skills that will not grow with your organization. |
| IT Staffing AssessmentEven the most carefully executed workforce plan can be undone by poor capacity data. Starting with accurate inputs is crucial to knowing how much work can be done by existing teams, and identifying inefficiencies that could cost you additional workforce resources. |
Measure the value of this blueprint
Tracking success metrics ensures you are able to realize the value of investing time in workforce planning, and course correct if your work is not bringing results. Select metrics according to what matters most for your organization, and review them regularly. As goals change, so should success metrics.
| Project Outcome | Metric |
| Reduced total headcount | Total number of IT employees |
| Reduced training costs | Average cost of training (including facilitation, materials, facilities, equipment, etc.) per IT employee |
| Reduced number of overtime hours worked | Average hours billed at overtime rate per IT employee |
| Reduced length of hiring period | Average number of days between job ad posting and new hire start date |
| Reduced number of project cancellations due to lack of capacity | Total number of projects cancelled per year |
| Increased number of projects completed per year (project throughput) | Total number of project completions per year |
| Greater net recruitment rate | Number of new recruits/terminations and departures |
$ 4,700 is the average cost to hire a new employee
Society for Human Resource Management, 2022
Companies currently considering some form of hiring/salary freeze or cutbacks, if a recession occurs:
- Small Companies: 90%
- Medium Companies: 82%
- Large Companies: 66%
Note:
- Small: <101 employees
- Medium: 101-5000 employees
- Large: >5,000 employees
Source: Info-Tech State of the Hybrid Workplace in IT Report, 2022
Insight Summary
Insight 1
Your workforce plan is more than a projected headcount. It must consider work efficiency and talent sourcing. These factors come together into your own “workforce equation.” Info-Tech helps you automate the analysis so you can account for all the factors and data that will determine your success.
Insight 2
A workforce plan is only as good as the goals it supports and the data it builds on. Reactively backfilling vacant roles will only perpetuate your status quo – causing you to fall behind as the needs of your business change. Ensure your workforce plan is built on accurate, up to date inputs that include your IT strategy and associated success metrics, so that the plan you build can deliver maximum business value.
Insight 3
When a skill gap appears, don’t rush to hire into it. Understanding the best way to fill skill gaps – whether by hiring, outsourcing, or training – is a critical part of managing your limited workforce resources. Take factors such as the longevity of the skill need, your need for its round-the-clock availability, and its criticality to the business to determine the optimal way to fill the gap.
Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs
DIY Toolkit
"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."
Guided Implementation
"Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."
Workshop
"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."
Consulting
"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."
Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all four options.
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 4-phase advisory process. You'll receive 6 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
Guided Implementation 1: Needs Assessment
- Call 1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.
Guided Implementation 2: Define Workforce Demand
- Call 1: Determine scope and identify information sources.
- Call 2: Review IT demand estimates.
Guided Implementation 3: Identify Workforce Supply
- Call 1: Review final FTE gaps and identify the most critical ones.
Guided Implementation 4: Build and Deploy Workforce Plan
- Call 1: Review sourcing considerations and decisions.
- Call 2: Review workforce plan presentation and communication plan.
Contributors
- Anne Roberts, President, Leadership Within Inc.
- Cindy Grant, Vice President, HR, Trisura Guarantee Insurance Company
- Laurie Johnson, GC3 Getting Connected Coaching & Consulting
- Martha McIver, Vice President Canada HR, CBRE Limited
- Noelle Sargent, EVP, HR, International Financial Data Services
- Kate Wootton, Director People & Culture, CAMH Foundation
- Corey Johnson, Vice President Information Services Delivery
- 2 Anonymous contributors
Build a Strategic IT Workforce Plan
Build a Data-Driven Workforce Plan: A Critical CIO Exercise
