Work Placement Landscape

Part of the Planning Week chain · previous: The Placement Gate · next: The Two-Arc Roadmap Work placement landscape is a one-page table with four bands, hub, service center, partner and automated, and two rows, the current state and the end state, on which every body of work a workforce function plans for is shown as a tile in the band where it sits. It matters because a leadership room can argue about placement in the abstract for a day and agree it in ten minutes once the work is on the page in front of them. The page produces the landscape table (LT) and is worked in a session with Wiki:Packs/Strategy on a Page (CP-WFM-011), with the transitions carried into Wiki:Packs/Two-Arc Roadmap (CP-WFM-015); it opens Day 4 afternoon of a planning week, before the roadmap.

Bands of placement, not bands of work

The landscape form is a familiar one: bands showing where the team sat — regional, divisional, national — with process tiles stacked in the current state and moved in the end state. The adaptation changes what the bands are. Here the bands are nodes, and a node is a place work can sit: a hub (in-country depth), a service center (badged arbitrage at scale), a partner (speed, market access, flex), or automated. The tiles are bodies of work, not processes, and the pair of rows shows where the work sits, which is the question a placing function exists to answer.

One distinction is stated once so that it is not confused for the rest of the chain. Three Bands of Work sorts work into discretionary, overseen and specified by how completely it is documented and measured; those are bands of work, a property of the process as written down. This page's bands are bands of placement, a property of where the work is done. The two cross: a specified body of work may sit at any of the four placement bands, and the automated band can hold only specified work. A room that keeps the two sets of bands apart can say "this work is specified and sits at the partner" without contradiction; a room that merges them will find itself arguing that automation is a place.

The four bands and their node attributes

Each band carries the attributes that make it the right place for some work and the wrong place for other work. The attributes are the ones the placement gate's supply cards read (The Placement Gate); the landscape shows them as a row header, not as a score.

Band	What it uniquely supplies	What it is the wrong place for	Cost and depth
Hub	In-country depth: language, regulation, on-soil clearance, the work that must be done where the client is	Steady base load that has no on-soil requirement; carrying surge slack	Highest cost per productive hour; deepest tenure; too expensive to idle
Service center	Low cost with control and stable tenure at scale; the default node for base load once the estate holds one	Swing capacity; repeated hire-and-release burns the tenure that justifies it	Low cost; depth grows with tenure; built for steady scale
Partner	Speed to seat, release without severance, presence in a market the estate does not hold	Depth work vented on price; base load placed for rate reasons where a service center exists	Priced flex with a cost floor; depth discount is structural
Automated	Deterministic execution of specified work with a measured definition of done, at a marginal cost that falls with volume	Discretionary work; anything without a step table and a catch rate	Lowest marginal cost; depth is the specification's, not a person's

The reasons behind the attributes live on their own pages and are not restated: why a partner is bought for variance absorption and market access rather than rate once a service center exists (Outsourcing as a Risk Lever); why the two fixed nodes are the wrong place to hold variance (The Vendor as Relief Valve); why sourcing tier is a property of the node rather than of the queue or the client (Service Chain Decomposition and Node Sourcing); and why what kind of work it is and who owns the client relationship decide the cell, with location a consequence (Sourcing Design Axes: Node and Client Ownership). The finding that front-office service work crossing the outsourcing boundary carries a measurable customer-satisfaction penalty — onshore outsourcing as much as offshore, so the penalty attaches to the firm boundary rather than to geography — is the empirical floor under the partner band's "wrong place for" cell; that the penalty is smaller where the work is asynchronous, decomposable and fast to proficiency is that page's reading of the same decomposition, not this paper's finding.

Current state and end state, one table

The device that makes the page work is that the current state and the end state are two rows of the same table, with the same bands as columns, so the eye reads the transition as a movement of tiles rather than as two diagrams. A tile is a body of work, named by what it is (a client book, a channel within a book, a function such as fulfillment), never by a team. Each tile carries three marks: its band of work (discretionary, overseen, specified), its supply-seat use if it sits at the partner (valve, held, automating), and whether its placement is decided on paper or in operation.

Row	Hub	Service center	Partner	Automated
Current state	Tiles as they sit today, including the inherited placements each heritage brought	Tiles as they sit today	Tiles as they sit today, with the supply-seat use each block currently carries (often more than one, which the row makes visible)	Tiles already automated, usually few
End state	The work that needs on-soil depth, and nothing that does not	Base load at parity; the default for anything with no on-soil requirement and no automation path yet	Each block with exactly one use; consolidated by body of work	Every specified body of work that has passed the handover gate

The current-state row is filled from the truth funnel's situations (Truth About Today) and from the supply-seat cards, without judgment: a tile that sits at the partner for three reasons at once is drawn with three marks, which is a fact about the estate and not a verdict on the people who placed it. The end-state row is filled from the principles (Operating Principles for Work Placement): principle 1 moves any tile whose only reason for its band is history; principle 4 gives each partner block one use; principle 7 moves specified work toward the automated band. A tile whose end-state band is the same as its current band is not a failure of ambition; most tiles do not move, and the page is as much a record of what stays as of what goes.

The transitions, and what each buys

Between the rows sit the transitions, and each is one of the two arcs seen from the tile's point of view. Arc 1 consolidate and standardize (Level 2 to 3 by hand) and Arc 2 automate (Level 3 to 4 by engine) are the chain's two arcs; the landscape shows what each buys for a given tile.

Transition	Arc	What it buys	What it costs	Gate it passes
Partner block from three uses to one	1	A contract form that protects the right thing; a valve that regulates because it is open for one job	A renewal negotiation; some base load moving to the service center	The placement gate on each block; principle 4
Base load from partner to service center at parity	1	Tenure depth the estate keeps; cost at the captive rate without a markup	A re-ramp, priced; a matched-tenure comparison before the move, not after	The parity comparison at matched tenure; the re-ramp priced (principle 3)
Fulfillment slices consolidated by body of work	1	One process set, one instrument, one commercial shape with an oversight clause (Consolidate, Then Automate: Back-Office Fulfillment)	Documentation to the standard before consolidation, not after	The acceptance gate on each process's documentation
Specified work from any band to automated	2	Marginal cost that falls with volume; the post shifting to oversight	A catch-rate program; an overseer; the supply-seat use "automating" on the partner block it leaves	The Agentic Handover Gate, cited and not restated
Hub tiles with no on-soil requirement to the service center	1 or 2	The hub's depth freed for the work that needs it	A re-ramp and a client conversation where the offer named a location	The gate's construct-fit test; the service tier's promise read from the contract

The "specified work to automated" transition concerns a body of work the function plans for, not the function's own planning work; the agent ladder on The Agent Team Ladder: Alpha to Production runs on the latter and sits inside Arc 1. The order of the transitions is the dependency order the roadmap carries: consolidation and one instrument before any move is compared, comparability before contracts, contracts before automation (The Two-Arc Roadmap). The consolidate-then-automate arc is a familiar one in operations, in which the waste is removed from a flow before the flow is mechanized, and the reason it holds for placement is that a tile automated before it is consolidated automates several versions of one process. The labor-economics finding that automation takes the routine tasks out of a job and leaves the residual harder than the average was — the argument The Hardening Residual carries in full — is why the hub row of the end state is not empty and why the tiles that stay there are the ones that were hardest all along.

Location as a consequence

The landscape has no column for location. A hub is in-country by definition and a service center is wherever the estate built it, but the decision the landscape records is the band, and the band is decided by what kind of work the tile is and who owns its client relationship; the place follows. This is the vision's order, right work, right capability, right location (Right Work, Right Capability, Right Location), drawn as a table. A room that adds a location column to the landscape will find the tiles moving toward whichever column resolves fastest, which is rate and speed to seat, and the capability conversation arriving two quarters later attached to a supplier rather than to the decision. The absence of the column is deliberate and the artifact carries the note in its footer.

Worked example

The chain's worked example function drew its landscape on Day 4 afternoon, Thu 23 Apr 2026, with about a dozen tiles. In the current-state row, the migrating corporate client book sat as two tiles, voice at the hub and chat at the partner, with the partner block carrying two uses (held for the language, valve for the phase 2 surge from Mon 30 Mar 2026); the partner-held scheduling team appeared as a tile of the function's own work, marked overseen, at the partner. In the end-state row, the chat tile stayed at the partner with one use, held, and the surge moved to a committed-flex block marked valve; the book's fulfillment slices were consolidated to one partner block marked automating, with the handover expected in Arc 2, once each consolidated process passes the agentic handover gate; the scheduling team's tile moved to the service center, marked "transitional until automated." Nine tiles did not move. The transitions were listed with their gates, and the one contested transition, the fulfillment consolidation, was parked to its node owner as the week's one parked decision. No numbers appear on the landscape; the tiles' sizes are read from the supply cards, where the book carries about 155 FTE rising to about 310 [E] at phase 2.

The artifact this page produces

The landscape table (LT), four bands by two rows, one tile per body of work. The transitions between its rows are entries in the roadmap's lane 6, simulation and placement engine, and lane 4, partner contracts and supply-seat portfolio (T8). One filled example tile, as it appears in both rows:

Tile	Current band	Current marks	End-state band	End-state marks	Transition and gate
Corporate client book, chat channel	Partner	overseen · held + valve (two uses) · decided on paper	Partner	overseen · held (one use); surge to a separate committed-flex block marked valve	Partner block from two uses to one; the placement gate on each block; Arc 1

Produced in a working session with Wiki:Packs/Strategy on a Page (CP-WFM-011), landscape block; the transitions are carried into the lane table with Wiki:Packs/Two-Arc Roadmap (CP-WFM-015); the filled table is part of blueprint v0.1.

What would change this

The page's claim is that a two-row landscape with no location column settles placement arguments a room would otherwise have in the abstract. The observation that would overturn it is a validation circuit in which node owners reject end-state tiles on grounds the four band attributes do not capture, in more than one band, and the grounds turn out to be about place (a client's contractual site, a regulator's residency rule) rather than about work or ownership. That would mean location is a constraint often enough to need its own column, and the page would add one as a hard-constraint marker on the tile rather than as a band.

How this connects

• Previous in the chain: The Placement Gate — every transition passes it
• Next in the chain: The Two-Arc Roadmap — the transitions become lane entries
• Defers to: Sourcing Design Axes: Node and Client Ownership (the two axes; location as a consequence) · Service Chain Decomposition and Node Sourcing (tier as a property of the node) · Outsourcing as a Risk Lever (what the partner is for) · Consolidate, Then Automate: Back-Office Fulfillment (the fulfillment transition) · Three Bands of Work (bands of work, which these are not)
• Feeds: Functional Organization Design for a Resource Optimization Center (the tiles the structure serves) · Resizing a Workforce Function After an Acquisition (the function's own tiles)

Maturity Model Position

Drawing the landscape is Level 2 to Level 3 work on the WFM Labs Maturity Model™: it is the first written answer to the scope-and-placement question (Level 2: Structured Workforce Management Foundational to Level 3: The Automation Layer Progressive). The end-state row's automated band describes Level 4 Advanced practice (Level 4: Planning in Distributions) and is drawn before it is reached. Four scales on this wiki use the word "level"; Planning Week for a Workforce Function states which is which. This page uses the maturity Levels 1–5.

See Also

• Planning Week for a Workforce Function
• Operating Model for Workforce Management — the scope and placement component
• Operating Principles for Work Placement — principles 1, 4 and 7 draw the end-state row
• The Vendor as Relief Valve — the valve and the held placement
• Integrated Global Resource Optimization Center — placement as the defining addition