CASE STUDIES

Buckinghamshire County Council

Business need drove the workforce planning project at Buckinghamshire County Council. This
recognized that current workforce planning practices would not meet the challenge of the Care
Standards Act 2000, or of future service delivery. One of the main issues in working with children and
families was recruiting and retaining qualified social workers. There were insufficient numbers of social
workers in the post. Turnover levels among established and new employees were high. The council,
therefore, decided to align strategy and workforce planning in social care for children and families. The
workforce plan was developed with the input of a team of representatives from social care for children
and families. It was recognized that workforce planning was essential to anticipate future areas of skills
shortages. This council is now in a position to anticipate skills shortages and has dealt with them
innovatively and immediately.

The workforce plan looked at short- and long-term planning. Short-term planning covered immediate
action on recruitment and promotion. Long-term planning covered activities that may span the next five
years. Workforce planning allowed for an assessment of skills and an exploration of the levels
employees need to work at.

Plymouth Primary Care Trust

The trust set up a multidisciplinary team drawn from the workforce planning and development
department, finance, and public health teams within the organization to introduce workforce planning
across the whole organization. The trust’s 230 managers and budget holders were then invited to an
awareness programme to introduce the Six Steps Workforce Planning Methodology developed by the
NHS Workforce Projects Team (2009).

The steps are: 1 Define the plan. 2 Map service change. 3 Define the required workforce. 4 Understand
workforce availability. 5 Plan to deliver the required workforce. 6 Implement, monitor and refresh.
Managers were informed that, using this framework, they would be required to produce plans over a
one year, two-year and five-year timescale. The guide was applied by asking each manager to define
their workforce plan, outline forces for change, assess demand, assess supply, undertake a gap analysis
and subsequent action planning, and carry out implementation and a review of the plans. It was found
that while some managers were skilled in workforce planning, the majority needed support to link
together the financial, workforce, and planning elements of the process.

The outcomes were: ● trust-wide workforce planning, using electronic staff record and planning tools; ●
workforce planning is now part of day-to-day trust business; ● detailed workforce plans across clinical
and nonclinical directorates; ● increased awareness of financial position, age profiles, and workforce risk
assessment; ● the development of a more efficient workforce by reviewing skill mix and succession
planning; ● integration of workforce planning into the corporate management programme.

Siemens (UK)

Workforce planning at Siemens (UK), the engineering and technology services company, involves
obtaining answers to three fundamental questions: What do we have? What do we want? How do we
fill the gap? At the highest level, the corporate people strategy gives the context for workforce planning,
the key objective of which is to ensure that Siemens has the right level of capability to execute its
business strategy. In essence, the process of workforce planning is one in which the business strategy
converges with the people strategy. The workforce planning process starts with a review of the current
workforce derived from SAP data [SAP is a business software system] and onto this is overlaid the likely
attrition. Future requirements are identified by means of a dialogue between HR business partners and
business unit managers. This enables the skills in each job family to be matched to business initiatives
and provides the basis for the workforce forecast.