(or What's Been Keeping Me Busy!)

What if you could predict the future without error? What if there was a solution that could solve all your workforce issues?

In actual fact, there is no way to fully predict the future. Neither can any one solution solve all your workforce issues.

Let’s face it, if it were that easy Human Resources (HR) professionals would not be necessary to the strategic and operational success of an organization. They would be providing administrative and clerical functions only. Attracting, training, motivating and retaining employees are an age old issues that are actually getting more complex, not less.

For over 8 years, we have been focused on building software solutions for HR and Finance. Many of the tools we’ve built in that time involve some component of workforce management or planning.

More recently we started looking at all the work we’ve done over the years, and then at what we could be doing to help deal with the current workforce planning problems being faced by many organizations and corporations. We can’t solve all of the problems for an organization. What we decided to focus on was providing tools so that the organization would be much better positioned to solve its own problems… without breaking the bank.

One of the tenets of management is “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”.

One of the tenets of leadership is “if you don’t know where you are going, you can’t possibly get there”.

So to me, the first step in generating solutions to the workforce problems today is providing a tool for workforce planning that:

  • Can measure where you are today, and
  • Can forecast where the organization is going to be 5-20 years out.

This is what we have done. I am proud to say that version 2.0 of our ForecastHR tool (which measures and forecasts your workforce demographics and hiring events) has been successfully implemented for a major client organization. We’ve done a fair amount of research and interest is high in other organizations as well.

We have lots of ideas on where version 3.0 and beyond of the tool can go and guess what? We listen to our clients and improve the tool based on their feedback so the future of the tool looks bright. And we have even more ideas for other tools.

We are providing the tools. Effective organizations will use the tools to make better decisions and focus on critical areas for maximum benefit. Right now we have to content ourselves with being happy doing the part we do best… providing the tools and whatever insight we can.

The next step is building the marketing engine so that the tool can get out to all those who can best use it and then to scale up the delivery engine.

That is the entrepreneurial part that is exciting as well.