I know its not the end of financial year as we still have one more quarter to go. It’s however very important to draw of all significant plans within the last quarter and then start making adjustment early on so that you can take on the first three quarters of the next financial year without “loosing” more time in planning.
Planning for the HR is very important function in order to ensure that you have production capacity to undertake any expansion plans or support other organizational objectives. You need to sit down and answer the following questions:
1. What are new positions within the organizations that will be filled?
2. How many people will be required in what positions?
3. How will the current man-power evolve? (Think promotion and attrition!)
4. What are the new competencies that will be required?
5. What jobs would you like to remain in-house and what would you like to outsource?
Once the future labor requirement and the current availability has been clearly established, the gap is action oriented target that can be handed over to the HRD (if you have one!) or in some cases you may need to draw a more detailed plan to fill those gaps. As soon as you begin to think of HR requirements, it is important to separate the qualitative issues from the quantitative issues. Let’s talk about them in more details:
Quantitative Issues
The quantitative issues are easiest to spot. A simple way to do this is simply calculating the ratio between number of people in the company and the current revenue and then calculating the number of people required to achieve the targeted revenue. Ofcourse, this assumes that efficiency with the organization does not change and this short process usually does the job pretty well.
So, if you have 2 employees who are maintaining 40 client installations and generating $20000 every month, you simply calculate that by doing 60 client installations, you will generate revenue of $30000 and you will need one more employee. This “1” employee then needs to be hired and trained before he is actually needed for production.
Qualitative Issues
In a layman term these are the sort of issues that you can’t put number against and usually means that the current man-power or a part of it does not have the skills and knowledge future job requirements or in some cases you may see that the person is overqualified for the particular job. These are the sort of issues that can only be handled by Training and Restructuring. As as business owner you must realize that right people with right skills and doing the right jobs are the precondition to success.
Is Outsourcing a Qualitative or Quantitative decision?
Outsourcing is a quantitative decision only when same economies of scale can be achieved with an outside vendor or when it’s a strict question of changing capacity within an existing relationship. Getting this plan ready with you will allow you to look for possible outsourcing opportunities early and notify your vendor in advance about your ramp-up or ramp-down plans. However, if you ask yourself – “Can this job be done better by a specialized vendor because I want to focus on core areas?” – it becomes a qualitative decision.
The core is that you must plan ahead of time about what you are going to outsource and in what volume.
