Broadening the Base for Strategic Workforce Planning: The Value of Cross-Functional Partnerships

What differentiates leaders who’ve made steady headway with their SWP programs? Often, it’s their ability to partner with other functions and, by doing so, to broaden the base of support for SWP. After more than six years of observing hundreds of companies launch SWP or step up their initial efforts from one year to the next, the conclusion is going it alone can be disastrous.

In 2009, The Conference Board introduced the SWP Maturity Model, a framework that shows a fairly typical evolutionary path of strategic workforce planning. The Maturity Model gives companies a yardstick for assessing their current SWP practices and knowing what the next stage of SWP maturity looks like. But getting from one stage to the next is difficult without organizational allies; this report details the pitfalls involved and best practices for avoiding them.