I recently made a presentation on the differences between workforce planning and analytics to the Workforce Planning Roundtable, which is a great group that is focused on building the community of practice in workforce planning – strongly recommend that all workforce planning practitioners check it out.

I was really curious about the interest in this presentation because it shows that there is a lot of concern in the marketplace in the differences between planning and analytics, yet I see them as joined at the hip and indispensable to each other.  Analytics is the quantitative, diagnostic process that creates the need to plan – and planning is the more qualitative process of using the analytics to decide what you need and what internal and external supply patterns, trends and predictions merit a response.  Analytics is part of the stair-step evolution towards being a planning organization.

I wonder: How many organizations are doing workforce planning and workforce analytics as separate efforts still?  What are the reasons for separating the two activities and are they the right reasons or are they based only on legacy?