Planning Week Intro

Companion to the Planning Week chain · the launch page carries the week's full structure; the session guide opens each session

A planning week is four consecutive days in which the leadership of a workforce planning function answers, together and in one room, the eight questions that define how the function operates. This page is for the rest of the function — the planners, team leads and analysts who are not in the room, and who will hear the week happened before they see anything from it.

The most useful thing to know about it is this: nothing the room decides is settled when the room breaks. The week's answers are explicitly drafts, and they become real only once the people who run the work have seen them and have had the chance to say where they are wrong. A planner who tells their director that the room has described their work incorrectly is not raising an objection out of turn. That correction is a designed step, and the week does not finish without it.

Why it is done in one room

The eight questions an operating model sets out — strategy, scope, process, governance, roles, structure, measures and technology — are normally answered separately and months apart, by whoever is closest to each one. Answered that way they tend to drift out of agreement, so that the structure implies one set of roles while the scorecard rewards another. The Case for Operating Model Planning carries the full argument for taking them together; the short form is that the answers are only useful if they agree, and the cheapest way to make them agree is to take them in one sitting, in an order where nothing decided later reopens anything decided earlier.

What the week does not decide

Three things in particular, because they are what people reasonably assume a closed-door week is about.

It is not a reorganization, and it is not a headcount exercise. The week does choose a structure, and prints on it the conditions under which it is retired, describing it as a transition state rather than an end state. But size is worked out from the shape of the work the function carries rather than from a target, and headcount comes out of that method rather than being fed into it.

It does not decide where any particular body of work sits. Those decisions belong to the owners of that work, and they keep them; what the week agrees is the set of rules those owners will use, so that two such decisions taken months apart are made on the same basis.

It does not produce a strategy deck. What leaves the room on Day 4 is a set of filled-in templates — among them a charter for the function, a catalog of its processes, role definitions, an organizational option with the conditions for retiring it, a technology plan, a roadmap carrying a seat rather than a person against every lane, and a record of every decision marked taken, deferred or parked. Planning Week for a Workforce Function lists them in full.

What reaches the team, and when

Each function owner leaves with a workbook of fifteen sections, described on The Function Service Pack. Every section carries the answer the room reached for the function as a whole and asks the owner for the local one — what it means for this team, this book of work, this shift pattern.

The owner works through it in three steps: take the room's answers to the team and find out where they are wrong, write the function's own version, then run the first change. The first step is why a planner should expect to see the week's answers rather than its conclusions — in the usual case within about two weeks of the room breaking, because that is the period the correction runs in.

How the room gets corrected

That period is the validation circuit, and four checks run inside it. Each director takes the answers back to their own team. Finance checks what has been counted as inside the function, and what it has been measured against. The seat dealing with delivery partners checks how the different kinds of place work can sit have been described. Human resources checks the structure.

Answers that survive those four checks stand. Answers that do not are corrected, and the correction is written down rather than quietly absorbed. That record is the mechanism by which a set of answers reached by a leadership team becomes an operating model the whole function can work in.

The circuit is not the only route. Open office hours run twice a month, are open to everyone in the function, and take whatever is brought on the day ahead of the standing agenda — so something noticed after the circuit has closed does not have to wait to be asked for.

How this connects

• What reaches the team: The Function Service Pack — the fifteen-section workbook
• Where anyone can turn up: Open Office Hours for Next-Generation Workforce Planning — the standing forum, open to everyone, where the workbooks are filled afterward
• The week itself: Planning Week for a Workforce Function — the full structure

See Also

• The Case for Operating Model Planning — why a leadership team does this together
• Operating Model for Workforce Management — the eight questions
• Planning Week Session Guide — every session opened in two or three sentences, for those attending