Adopting Agile Practices for Workforce Management: Benefits, Challenges, and Practices

At the core of agile is the better ability to respond to change (agility), less defined roles and top-to-down control (decentralized decision making), and increased visibility and promoted trust (collaboration). 

Agile methodology has proved its value in software development with reduced risks of product failure and delivering value in the quickest possible time. Resulting in minimized losses and maximized productivity, something workforce management tries to achieve.

Agile projects have a 64% success rate, almost 1.5X more successful than waterfall projects. And 71% of U.S. companies are now using Agile practices to manage various job functions including non-IT. 

Thus, the same agile practices, principles, and values can be adopted in workforce management to reap similar benefits. 

The purpose of workforce management is to maximize productivity and minimize loss by having the right resources in the right places at the right times. 

In this article, I will shed light on how you can implement agile practices for workforce management, and its benefits, challenges, and best practices.  

I will also talk about popular agile scaling frameworks like SAFe, LeSS, DA, Spotify, and Scrum@Scale (S@S). By the end of this article, you will have an insight and understanding of the impact of agile scaling on workforce management. 

Understanding Agile Scaling Frameworks 

Before you understand the implementation of agile in workforce management, it is very important to first understand agile scaling and agile scaling frameworks.  

Agile scaling is the process of implementing agile values, principles, and practices to people and processes organization-wide. And the structured approach to scaling agile at the enterprise level is called the agile scaling framework.  

The concept of agile scaling originally came into existence from the need to scale the software development team to meet the growing product demands. When there is more work to be done than your agile team can handle in a given period of time, it’s time to scale. Agile scaling frameworks facilitate multiple teams to work together while maintaining agility. 

Seeing the possibility of agile scaling, agile practices started getting implemented in other non-IT processes of an organization to make it better able to adapt to change. Thus, agile scaling became synonymous with the cultural transformation of an organization to agile. 

Popular Agile Scaling Frameworks 

One cannot just simply replicate the agile practices at the enterprise level to scale agile. You need a framework to scale agile because various factors play a role in it such as team size, culture shift, and industry requirements. Here is a brief overview of the top five agile scaling frameworks:     

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

SAFe is the most trusted and popular agile scaling framework. It has 10 foundation principles to align the right people, deliver high-quality solutions, and respond to change. 

Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS)

Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) is a lightweight agile scaling framework that is primarily regular Scrum applied to large-scale development. It focuses on a customer-centric approach to development.

Scrum@Scale (S@S)

Scrum@Scale is an extension of Scrum's agile methodology. It revolves around the concept of the Scrum of Scrums (SoS). It includes each team choosing an individual to represent them in the SoS meetings. 

The aim of each day’s SoS meeting is to improve coordination and communication among multiple teams.

Disciplined Agile (DA)

DA is a hybrid of different agile frameworks such as Kanban and Scrum. It is easier than other frameworks to adopt due to its flexibility in adopting agile strategies.    

Spotify 

Spotify wasn’t a framework but more of a model to scale agile. It focuses on the importance of culture and networks to manage multiple teams. It emphasizes building autonomous and cross-functional teams for work alignment.  

How Agile Practices Can Be Adopted for Workforce Management

To understand the implementation of agile practices for workforce management, first, it is very important to understand the common challenges faced in workforce management (WFM). 

Traditional WFM has a certain degree of challenges associated with it because of the times it is designed for. For example, workforce plans are usually designed to execute on an annual basis and budgets are fixed for the year. This was good when the market was not dynamic. 

But in today’s market, you cannot create a workforce plan, forecast resource needs, and fix a budget for the entire year. 

You need to be agile in workforce planning to better adapt to changing market needs and achieve the objectives of your organization.  

Agile principles can help you in that with agile workforce planning. 

Sprint Planning 

Agile focuses on breaking large work into small, time-fixed, iterative sprints to better respond to changing requirements. 

You can create sprints for shorter workforce planning cycles. This helps you more accurately forecast the resource needs, allocate budgets, find resources aligned to project needs, and respond to the changing market needs.

You can consider the market situations into account and make changes to the next cycle of workforce planning to fulfill your objectives rather than adhering to a fixed plan created at the beginning of the year. 

Collaboration 

The agile value of collaboration can be applied at different layers of the organization to better cater to the skills gaps. 

For example, HR managers can take inputs from the line managers, subject matter experts, and key stakeholders to learn about the exact skills requirements of a resource. It helps them find the right resources rather than making decisions in the silos.         

Feedback Loops 

The other core agile values of incremental delivery, collecting feedback, and making improvements can be adopted for better workforce planning and employee scheduling. 

You can review your workforce needs at a shorter cycle, collect feedback, and make improvements as needed to meet the changing requirements than following a rigid workforce plan throughout the year.      

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to adopting agile for workforce management — more of an end goal of executing practices, driving value, and making improvements.  

Benefits of Agile Workforce Management 

Agile workforce management provides the necessary agility and adaptability required to meet changing requirements.

 Have a look at the key benefits of agile workforce management.      

• Better forecast resources: Agile workforce management encourages iterative planning. This helps you better forecast resource needs and make adjustments to the staffing based on changing demands. Additionally, helping you to have the right resources at the right place at the right time.  

• Improved employee scheduling: Agile management uses techniques like daily stand-up meetings to coordinate and schedule work. It helps to ensure alignment of work with team capacity and employee availability. This helps you improve payroll efficiency, avoid understaffing or overstaffing issues, and increase productivity.   

• Reduce risks: Agile encourages feedback loops. Thus, you can understand the workforce’s needs better and respond to them quickly. You can use iterations to test new ideas and make sure they're effective before moving on to the next phase of planning.        

• Collaborative decision-making: Agile focuses on collaboration for decision-making rather than decisions made in silos or top-to-down workforce planning. All the stakeholders are involved in decision making and requirements are appropriately communicated.  

• Better work-life balance: Employee burnout is one of the major challenges faced by the workforce. Agile encourages self-organizing teams. It empowers employees to make decisions and take ownership of their work which helps reduce employee burnout, increase employee engagement, and enhance job satisfaction. 

Challenges in Agile Scaling for Workforce Management  

Agile is more of a mindset than a principle. To scale agile, you have to shift from the old way of working to new means. Thus, it can pose a series of challenges. 

Here are the three major challenges you may face:          

Culture Shift 

Most organizations have a command-and-control management style over an open style of leadership, fixed milestones and budgets over continuous improvement, and extensive planning over failing fast and learning. 

Thus, to scale agile, you need a change of mindset first at a leadership level and then at the employee level.

Lack of Proper Understanding of the Agile Framework

Agile is complex to understand. It is different from traditional management in many ways. For example, in an agile development team, there is no project manager. 

Teams are self-organizing. It is hard for someone coming from a traditional work management style to adapt to agile. Thus, it requires training and learning to make your team skilled in agile. 

Technology Requirements            

Without the right technology, you cannot scale agile. 

For example, managing a cross-functional agile team and making multiple agile teams work together means you need a technology stack to create visibility, transparency, and information flow. Thus, you have to adopt technological solutions that help you scale agile.   

Case Studies and Real-Life Examples of Agile Scaling 

There are many organizations that successfully scaled agile at an enterprise level to make organizations better adapt to change. Here are the three popular case studies:   

1. Spotify: Spotify, a popular music streaming service, uses agile scaling for workforce management. It uses a framework called Squads, Tribes, and Chapters to scale agile across the organization. It has helped Spotify become one of the most successful music streaming services in the world by making the organization customer-centric.

2. Siemens: Siemens, a multinational technology company, has used agile scaling for workforce planning. The company used agile frameworks such as Kanban to allocate resources to match project demands. It helps Siemens allocate resources based on project priorities leading to improved workforce management and project outcomes.

3. Philips: Philips, a multinational electronics company, has used an agile framework called SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) to scale agile. It helps them improve their product development process and customer satisfaction.

Best Agile Scaling Practices for Workforce Management 

There is no one right way to agile scaling, but some practices can help you scale agile. Here are some of the best practices:   

• Define goals you want to achieve, establish roles, and make changes  in organizational structure

• Involve leadership in decision-making and communicate regularly  

• Choose the right Agile framework

• Run a pilot program at small scale  

• Train your employees on agile practices

• Use the right tools and technology

• Take time to change 

Conclusion 

In today’s world, almost every business function can benefit from agile. Agile values, principles, and practices provide the foundation for any business process to make it better adaptable to change. 

Workforce management can also benefit from agile practices. Agile workforce management makes the process iterative, enhances collaboration, and incorporates feedback, providing a better ability to respond to change and counter the challenges.