Across the federal government, leaders clamor for enough people to enable their organizations’ missions, while overseers look to optimize personnel and those in the political arena talk about a “bloated bureaucracy.”
While this isn’t new, what is surprising is that many leaders are unable to state how many people they really need to enable their missions. What is also eminently clear is that it’s critical for organizations today to have the ability to create capacity in current resourcing, or justify increased resourcing to address unmet needs. And that there is new urgency to size their organizations right.
The fact is that most government organizations today find their missions evolving at such a fast rate that they struggle to keep up. In a compressed budget environment, they find it difficult to hire and nearly impossible to allocate training dollars for retooling an existing workforce. Many staff members have poorly defined roles and responsibilities, causing inefficiency. Or they rely on old or anecdotal information about staffing requirements.
Thus, leadership falls into a vicious cycle: Every 12 to 18 months, leaders realign, reorient, and reshuffle their organizations. They do so for all the right reasons, but with little or no value.
The remedy? A structured process that forces a leader and leadership team into a series of conversations based on a combination of analytics and experience-based insights. Such an approach delves deeper into understanding the problem and finding solutions – typically leading to identification of 20 percent to 30 percent untapped capacity that can be freed to redeploy toward mission-critical activities.
Sizing right requires a blend of both art (expertise and experience) and science (data analytics) to gain clarity into the sizing challenge and then unlock value and capability. It begins with the science:
Level Set Value. Defining expectations of customers and constituents, leaving no doubt what the organization must do because the action is either required by law, required by the organization’s Secretary, or required to enable its mission. It delves into: Which priority outcomes must we deliver? How do resources line up against critical services, missions, and customers? What relative value do customers place on services and activities?
Size for Performance. Measuring performance in the context of understanding value provided by the organization. Are staff members underperforming, over-performing, or on target? How much work effort is needed to deliver prioritized value? What level of performance is the organization accountable for? Where can we rebalance resource supply and demand?
Unlock Potential. Reexamining periodically whether individuals are still best suited for the jobs they were assigned 6 to 12 months ago. For example: What external realities are affecting organizational achievement (geography, competition, portfolio, etc.)? How can we better deploy or reconfigure resources to sustain the advantages of a restructured organization?
Leadership must also address four “get rights,” which comprise the art of sizing right:
Unconstrained View. Setting the stage for a fresh appraisal, using a white-sheet, or zero-based, approach to examining performance and work requirements. Doing so helps both leader and team to break through status quo constraints, moving out of their comfort zone and away from thinking “this is how we did it last year.”
Beyond Benchmarks. While benchmarks may be desired, consider them as a GPS only for stimulating questions that need to be considered and answered, not as the answers themselves.
Explicit Trade-offs. Prioritizing efforts correctly, as by this stage leader and team know they cannot do everything they are tasked to do. This enables more informed decisions as well as transparency into assigning staff.
Cohesive Operating Model. Moving away from a top-down effort through which leadership dictates changes, this is an inclusive process involving the people who do the work. Not only does this improve team efforts, it strengthens the organization’s culture and increases staff commitment.
Many leaders of federal government organizations incorrectly estimate how many people they have or do not have, misjudge budget needed to properly staff their organizations, and have poor visibility into what it takes to create value. A “value-added,” analytical approach examining how best to resource the organization not only addresses these problems, but leads to a stronger, more agile, and leaner (e.g., fit) organization.
Howard Steinman is a principal with A.T. Kearney and a leader in the firm’s Public Sector, Aerospace and Defense practice in North America.
Beth Bovis is an A.T. Kearney partner and the global leader of its Organization and Transformation Practice.
