Episode 108: What Do You Need To Support Continuous Workforce Planning? (Interview with Abdul Hummaida)
On the show today, I am talking to Abdul Hummaida, Chief Technology Officer at orgvue. Throughout our conversation, Abdul shares his perspective on the evolution of org design and workforce planning and the shift that companies are making, to more frequent and regular planning cycles.
We also discuss:
The importance of having access to real-time data that can support planning decisions and enable collaboration across different parts of the business
The role of technology in supporting organisations to move to shorter planning cycles and provide better security when dealing with sensitive data
How to build an effective planning process that supports both bottom-up and top-down planning inputs to be aggregated and integrated in a transparent way
Abdul’s thoughts on how HR can add business value as we start to come out of the pandemic
Support for this podcast comes from orgvue. You can learn more by visiting https://www.orgvue.com.
You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.
Interview Transcript
David Green: Welcome to the show Abdul, it is great to have you on as a guest. Can you let listeners have a brief introduction to you and your role at orgvue?
Abdul Hummaida: Hi David, it is a pleasure to be here.
So, I am Abdul Hummaida. I am the chief technology officer at orgvue. The role of the chief technology officer at orgvue, at a high level, has two dimensions. One is working with our research and development teams, so those are the amazing teams that design, build, and operate our orgvue SaaS platform. And the other dimension is working alongside the executive team to support the business, work on our strategy, supporting our customers and partners.
David Green: Great and we will certainly be going into a bit more detail around what you are doing at orgvue and what orgvue is doing in the space, but firstly, it would be great to hear a little bit about your career history, how you got into the world of HR technology, and what prompted you to make the shift from your previous life outside of the HR tech space?
Abdul Hummaida: Sure. I actually started out life as a software engineer, I didn't plan to be in leadership. I was at university and my professor at the time, tapped me on the shoulder and he said “you don't want to go and work for a big corporation, you want to come and work for a startup.”
So I decided to do that and it was probably one of the best decisions in my career.
Working for a small startup, I got to learn just an incredible amount of stuff because you get the opportunity to try different things. I was really privileged to work on some really high profile projects. One of them, among many, was a long project with Apple.
Over time I was given the opportunity to lead teams. So my manager went on holiday, came back and found that I was able to just work with the team and help to keep them organised and he said “well, we ought to do something with you.” So they gave me opportunities to contribute to business development, conferences, but over time, my teams just kept on getting bigger and bigger until I woke up one day and found that I wasn’t coding anymore. We then got acquired by IBM. So I spent time working business controls and really learning how a big corporation like IBM functions. So that was an amazing opportunity.
When I was at IBM, back at that time, IBM was 426,000 people globally. There was always somebody who can help you work through something, so very resource rich. So, that wasn't the challenge. The challenge was connecting the dots. The challenge was finding out who that individual or team placed globally, who can work you through the problem that you are trying to fix. And so I was given that opportunity to kind of, really refine my skills in that particular area and that was just an incredible learning opportunity. From that point onwards, I had the privilege and luck to lead different teams and work in different sectors.
I landed at orgvue, in 2019. When I met the team, it was very clear that orgvue, had an amazing opportunity to really make an impact. The technology was there, the market need was definitely there, but the item that really sealed the deal for me to join orgvue, was the people.
It was very quickly very apparent, when I met the teams, that they have two ingredients and one was just an immense desire to succeed and to help our customers and the second was, the real want to be coached and helped.
So that was a big factor for me.
David Green: And the HR technology space in general, as someone that has come from outside HR tech, what are your observations of the HR tech space, given you have been in it coming up to three years now?
Abdul Hummaida: I think with a lot of the enterprise software space, it is catching up to consumer software. One of the interesting things that happened in the enterprise software space is the clear realisation that, as end-users we are accustomed to the experiences that we get in our consumer world and the devices that we use there. And it is not like as an end-user, I am going to have a different set of expectations when I interact with a piece of software. Consumer software, for some time, obviously had a huge focus on the end user experience, delighting users with the great experience is a key element of consumer software. So, enterprise software has been really catching up there and in particular HR related type software has been trying to catch up in that area. So there is a huge investment in bringing a great user experience to the HR software.
David Green: Yeah. Yeah. It is definitely something we are seeing out there because there are technologies that are in the HR space, and I won't mention names, that probably aren't that easy to use and that don't delight the end user.
Abdul Hummaida: Correct. And just a final point on that, I think it was seen as a transactional necessity within a business, rather than an enabler for a great experience, and rather than being seen as a means of engaging with people within an organisation. And I think that shift has then emphasised the need for better user experience within enterprise software in general, but also within HR software in particular.
David Green: Okay, so to move on to what orgvue is doing in the space it is playing in, there has obviously been a hell of a lot of disruptions to business over the last two years, since the start of the pandemic, but to be fair we were living in fairly disruptive times anyway. Organisations are obviously having to move faster to adapt and given the orgvue is focused on org design and workforce planning, what have you seen as the biggest impact to clients over the last two years? And how have things changed from a planning perspective?
Abdul Hummaida: So the pressures on organisations have existed for some time, I think the pandemic has just accelerated those. Our customers have always recognised the value of planning and planning regularly. Most of the customers that we speak to at a high level, probably more than half, plan yearly or every six months and there is a reason for that, typically it is because of the complexity of going through the planning process, and we can talk about that. But the shift has been that no longer is it an option to have longer planning cycles because the environment is changing so rapidly. Some organisations have seen an incredible shift in terms of some of the revenue streams have been completely switched off, that is the acceleration the pandemic has done, so the ability to replan and to change, find different revenue streams, to realign the workforce to ensure that those revenue streams are actually successful, it is incredibly invaluable. So the past couple of years have really emphasised the value of regular planning cycles and not just the planning, planning is important, but the monitoring of that plan and the replanning on a regular basis is a crucial element.
David Green: Because companies are having to adapt quicker to what is happening, aren't they? And obviously you want to try and be as ahead of events as you possibly can, it’s not always possible of course. The plans, as you said, are having to be revisited on a much more regular basis than before the pandemic, but if we go back five years, incredibly so since then. There is an element of planning which is technology enabled, is the technology really supporting that need to plan more regularly?
Abdul Hummaida: Technology can support that. Right now, the way that the particular workforce planning gets done as a process, a mixture of tools are used. So organisations typically use a mixed set of tools, tools that are not necessarily geared up for workforce planning. Some of the trends that we see is that organisation might use some kind of business modelling tool, a combination of HRIS type system, the favourite tool within the enterprise a spreadsheet, a mixture of consulting as well.
So, there are elements of technology that have been used in the process, but there is a missing gap of an end to end solution to workforce planning today, which is what we are focused on at orgvue, which is helping our customers by creating an end to end experience that manages the entire cycle of workforce planning
David Green: With this shift that we have talked about, where people are moving to more regular planning, is this just happening for workforce planning or is it happening on the org design side too? How are you seeing these two disciplines evolve and almost come closer together?
Abdul Hummaida: Very much so. There is a big overlap between organisational design and workforce planning. The way we see it, is that they are two sides of the same coin. There is a need for an end-to-end approach to workforce planning and it is one of the reasons that orgvue has made a recent acquisition of a company called Dynaplan, it is an amazing company that focuses on strategical workforce planning. With that particular acquisition orgvue gets a technology that is capable of really detailed business modelling and strategic workforce planning, as well as the amazing team that comes with it.
Our thinking is that the combination of Dynaplan and the focus on strategic workforce planning, with the existing capabilities that orgvue has, in terms of the operational aspects of workforce planning, the combination of the two provides a holistic end to end, to workforce planning. Definitely the evolution between the two, is that by doing regular planning you are able to really unlock more value of the planning that otherwise, typically gets done on a yearly or six monthly cycle.
David Green: Given all the changes that we are seeing to how organisations plan, we talked a little bit about how so let's go a bit deeper in the conversation, how can technology help? What could businesses do to try and deal with shorter planning cycles, improve their decision-making, and have better access to real time data?
Abdul Hummaida: One of the challenges in terms of carrying out the process of workforce planning is, the data that is required to carry out the process. The data itself, bringing it together in a centralised manner. The freshness of that data. How do you then get different parts of the organisation to collaborate, in terms of analysis of that data, of being able to model various scenarios or outcomes. Being able to do the negotiation that is typically required in a workforce planning process. Technology can significantly help with these challenges. One of the reasons that the workforce planning process doesn't happen as regularly today, is because of the complexities that I just mentioned. It is not that organisations don't see the value of regular planning, they do, most of our customers see significant value in being able to plan on a more regular basis. But right now, as it stands, there are some impediments that technology can significantly help with. That is the goal and the focus that we have at orgvue, is helping customers solve these complexities by having an end to end solution that helps the entire organisation work through the workforce planning process. And I think an additional important aspect of what I just described, is also having the security mechanism that helps the entire process run through because when you are dealing with workforce planning, you are typically dealing with really sensitive data and in some of the cases in terms of how the process gets done today, is that our sensitive data ends up being on spreadsheet and gets emailed around, which is a huge security risk. So my advice to customers, whether they use orgvue or use a different mechanism, is certainly be conscious of the security aspect, being able to have a mechanism to centralise that process and giving businesses the ability to plan regularly.
So technology definitely can be a great enabler for that.
David Green: And in terms of the data that you are bringing together, for some of the listeners that are either new to workforce planning or trying to grapple with it themselves. What are some of the data sources that you want to bring together, both data internal to the organisation, but maybe also external data as well?
Abdul Hummaida: Totally. I think whatever technology that gets used, the ability to ingest data from different sources is a crucial element. One of the challenges as part of the process right now, is the complexity of bringing in different data sources, having a workforce planning platform that is capable of ingesting different data sources. One of the things that we work hard on at orgvue, is the integration with different sources, also the flexible mechanisms that means that these different sources can be imported and orgvue is then capable of not expecting certain semantics of that data and being able to ingest different sources is a key element and one of the challenges today. Some of the existing tools can be quite rigid in terms of the ability to connect with different sources and then expecting data to be at a certain shape, which has a knock on effect of reducing the value because you end up carrying out the workforce planning process with a reduced set of sources.
David Green: When we come back in just a moment Abdul talks about the value of moving to more continuous planning cycles and how companies can remove some of the complexity that comes with trying to plan on a more regular basis.
If you are talking to an organisation, how would you help them understand the value proposition for them to move to more continuous planning? And how is this different to how companies might have thought about the value of planning a restructure for example, in the past?
Abdul Hummaida: So the value of regular planning is the ability to execute more rapidly. Most organisation talk about agile, but essentially it has not found a way to overcome the internal complexities that exist within every organisation. My view is that no organisation wakes up in the morning wanting to be inefficient, right? Not at the organisational level, not at the functional level, and not at the individual level. What we all have to deal with is the complexities of our environment and our belief is that by providing technology that significantly enhances that process, that enables different functions to carry out what they need to do for the business, and then being able to have a holistic view, brings huge value to organisations. The need to respond rapidly is absolutely well established. The past couple of years have clearly demonstrated that businesses that thrived were the businesses that were able to respond quickly, were the businesses that were able to respond both to their revenue streams, but also to look after their own people, to be able to interact with their customers and partners in an efficient way, and technology can be a huge enabler for that. I think organisations understand this, I don't think that there is a lack of understanding of the value of regular planning, I think the impediment has historically been the complexity of running the process, that has been the impediment. Our focus has been to create technology that speeds and enables that workforce planning process.
David Green: Yeah, because let's face it if we think about the last two years, let's take a bank for example, a big percentage of the bank’s staff are working in branches. Branches suddenly close down because of the lockdowns. All that kind of business is now moving online or through call centres. Companies were faced with the age old thing, do we just furlough people that are in a branch or are we getting higher demand in our customer call centres and online? Can we redeploy these people who have the skills to interact with customers, let’s be perfectly honest, and understand our products and services. So, being able to pivot quickly, as you said, by having that ability to continually plan, is so important.
Abdul Hummaida: Absolutely crucial. And being able to do the analysis of how you can then do that deployment rapidly, is absolutely crucial too.
David Green: Let’s look at how you tackle planning yourselves, at orgvue. What other organisations are you working with that are doing this well and how are they approaching the shift, to more frequent planning? It is aways so powerful to hear case studies.
Abdul Hummaida: Sure. Recognition of the value of regular planning is the first step.
The second step is using more and more technology and technology that is actually centralised. By centralised I mean, a means of bringing different data sources together, the ability to ensure that data is clean and accurate and reflective of the current state and then enabling the different functions within the organisations, that actually then collaborate efficiently on the workforce planning process.
We see a huge demand for that as a capability. Orgvue has been investing in exactly that and we will be launching some capability on that, later on this year and we will talk about that in due time. But that is a huge demand that we see from our customers who approach us on this and talk to us about this, regularly. Internally within orgvue, we plan at two cycles, so we have the quarterly and yearly. As a fast-growing business, being able to rapidly re-plan, is crucial for us. So we would plan for the year, we have a set view of the demand that we want to have, in terms of our workforce, and then on a regular basis, we would ensure that the monitor plan is actually working well and if not, we would make some adjustments.
To dive a little bit deeper into that, let’s take the research and development which is the function that I work with very closely, you create a plan based on the growth that you are focused on. But if you look at the workforce, whenever you are doing hiring, the market also has an impact in terms of what your plan ends up being, right? So you might want to bring in certain skillsets, but availability within the market could change that. So the ability to go back, on a regular basis and say, okay, so we wanted to hire five senior software engineers and five data scientists but the availability in the market was slightly different, so you have to react to that.
The reaction to that, could be two things. One, it could be readjustment of the existing resources that we have in different teams, that means that a specific initiative that we have, can continue because we were able to replan the funding.
So regular planning, even internally within all of you, that is something that we see a significant value from and allows us to operate in the way that we want. It is actually also an additional benefit that we see internally, within orgvue. So there is the achieving our business objectives, which I have just talked about, but there is another benefit, by reassigning our workforce on a quarterly basis, we give our internal people the opportunities to experience different projects. We see that as a key element of the development of our people. So there is an internal benefit from doing that and it is actually one of the factors that help us have the retention levels that we have, within research and development, at orgvue.
So, yeah, it is a significant value both at the business level, as well as the people development level as well.
David Green: You talked about some functionality that is coming. What is next for orgvue, in terms of product development? The stuff that you are able to share, obviously.
Abdul Hummaida: Yeah, sure. So our view is a cohesive, end-to-end, capability, for workforce planning. The ability for the business to set a target or a demand for various dimensions for the organisation. So it could be headcount, it could be cost, it could be other dimensions too, but then enabling the various functions within the organisations to set their workforce requirements and do what is typically called, the bottom up. And so the capability will then provide the cohesion between, what the business, or finance, may have said and what the different business functions want, and then the negotiation that is required between the two.
The critical element of that negotiation, is how that discussion and negotiation is going to happen. So the capability needs to provide transparency in that process, delegation so that the different functions can efficiently perform their own planning and then be able to aggregate all of that way up across the organisation. Again, the objective of the goal is to simplify the process, then empower the different functions to be able to do the planning. If it is cumbersome, if it needs to be run by a single function, then that means it becomes complex and it means it doesn't get run regularly.
So one of the ways of un-bundling that and simplifying it, is to enable the different functions to plan separately, but then have the ability for all of that to be aggregated up, for any negotiation that needs to happen or the gap analysis can then happen centrally and then the businesses can make decisions on that basis.
David Green: And the way you just explained that to me Abdul, it seems obvious, but it just makes the process quicker and smoother if you have got that top and bottom up, coming together for that negotiation, I guess.
Abdul Hummaida: That cohesion s crucial. So, there are two elements to that. The cohesion and the distributed planning. The ability for the different functions to operate separately within the function and then aggregate and bubble that up.
It is no longer just a single element that is just run out of one function, by distributing that capability and also being able to bring it back together in a transparent way, is absolutely crucial.
David Green: The leads nicely to the next question. What are some of the tips that you would have for listeners, if they are looking at improving their capability in this area? Is this something you see HR owning or is it more of a partnership with finance, which I know something I have spoken about with Rupert in the past, and other parts of the business. How can HR teams get traction for this kind of work?
Abdul Hummaida: Sure. It is definitely a partnership. It is definitely a collaboration. I think for me, it is that empowering the business partners to work with the different functions. I advise listeners to seek technology that will help them facilitate that process, in a way that is distributed. So that, for example, business partners can work with the different functions directly and help them in that way, but then be able to aggregate that and bring that up, so that there is a transparent, holistic view within the entire organisation.
I think that is going to be really crucial in empowering the different functions, but also enabling the business to make decisions at the holistic level.
David Green: But again, that partnership between HR and finance is really important when it comes to planning.
Abdul Hummaida: Totally. It is important, but I think by using technology it facilitates that process, it reduces potential conflict because there is a lower dependency in the decision-making process.
There is a lower dependency, let's say on finance, to carry out that process. Finance still has a crucial role, typically in setting the target for the organisation, but then having the technology that enables the different functions, supported by business partners, to the distributed functional level. And then having technology that shows transparency, means there is less conflict in the entire process.
The transparency also means that you are working with accurate data, that you have enabled the organisation to participate in the process. So in my view, that really reduces the conflict and really creates a much more collaborative approach. I think it reduces the burden on finance as well.
David Green: I think the way you have outlined it, especially with the technology almost acting as the glue between the various actors in the planning process. It allows them to play their respective roles at the right time but it also allows them to come together at the right time too, when the discussion or the negotiation is required. There is some real clarity there, I think, in what you said Abdul.
Abdul Hummaida: I think people are still crucial in this entire process, but technology can definitely play a key enabler role.
David Green: One of the things we have been doing at Insight222, when we have been talking to the various organisations we are working with, most of these are heads of people analytics. We have seen people analytics teams increasingly becoming responsible for workforce planning and we are hearing from a lot of those companies that they are looking at skills based planning, which I guess is something you are probably hearing a lot as well. Is this something you are seeing? And how important is it for companies to move beyond planning just headcount and cost, and be able to capture skills data or other data, like activity data, as well?
Abdul Hummaida: Good question. We do see it increasingly and I do believe that it is an important part of the planning process. Orgvue itself has capabilities for collecting skill-based information and feeding it into the planning process and orgvue will grow and provide more capabilities to allow forecasting of that, in the future. My view is that it is in this first phase, I would say that, we are advocating for more regular planning as the first phase. I see this as a journey, my personal view on this, is that the first part of this journey is planning more regularly. By establishing that and seeing clearly, demonstrated, value, to the whole organisation from planning regularly, I think that will open the door for more core advanced planning and bringing in other elements, like skills-based planning, into the workforce planning process.
David Green: And in some of the organisations you work with are, no doubt, at that advanced planning stage. How does orgvue, bring some of that skills data in? Again, if you are able to share where that data is coming from, I am guessing a lot of internal systems, but is it pulling in external data as well for it?
Abdul Hummaida: So customers who are using those capabilities within orgvue today, typically utilise our serving mechanism within orgvue, to collect activity or competency-based data, and then are able to do analysis of that using the orgvue platform. In the future, there will be a capability to even feed that data into our forecasting engine and be able to do more advanced workforce planning and essentially feed it to the workforce planning process.
David Green: Your tip is, don’t run before you can walk, do more regular planning, show the business value of it and then move to the more advanced stuff.
Abdul Hummaida: That would be my view and the reason I think that today, is I think that the companies that have that advanced maturity stage are already doing that, but I think that the majority of companies today, are not planning more regularly. So my first advice would be to move to that and iteratively improve the process by layering in skills-based planning at the further stage.
For companies that feel that they can take the whole bite in one go, I think that would be amazing and I would love to see that, but I think a first good step is to plan more regularly, is the collaborate across the organisation, and is to use technology that empowers and simplifies that process as a first step.
David Green: That is a really clear first step, thanks, Abdul.
So this is now the question that we are asking everyone on this series. You might end up summarising some of the stuff that we have already covered on this.
What do you believe to be the two to three things, that HR will need to do to really add business value as we hopefully, and I say hopefully, come out of the pandemic?
Abdul Hummaida: I think technology companies have shown the value from investing in people ops and other industries have done that also. But I think there are really some good examples from technology companies. So my advice is to continue to invest in people ops strategy, I think that is really key. Also I think, empowering the business partners to work with different functions, I think that is really key. And using technology to automate most of what can be automated and free people to really focus on the elements that are much more difficult to do with technology. So the people touch. Technology can be an enabler for that, but I think that last mile is always the personal people touch.
My advice is to essentially, I think what I am saying is, focus on employees, leverage technology where possible, and Invest in people.
David Green: It has been great talking to you Abdul, and learning more about where orgvue is and where orgvue is going. Some really good tips there for HR professionals struggling to get to grips with more regular planning. Thanks for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, follow you on social media, if you do social media, and find out more about orgvue?
Abdul Hummaida: Certainly. I can be found on LinkedIn. You can also reach me through the orgvue.com website.