Excerpts

The Need for an Agile Workforce Organizations are now competing in two markets, one for their products and services and one for the talent required to produce or perform them. An organization's success in its business markets is determined by its success in the talent market. At the very time that business markets are expanding, talent markets seem to be shrinking. As the knowledge required to build products and deliver services increases, the retention of experienced employees becomes critical to improving productivity and time to market. In areas such as software development and nursing, the shortage of talent is so great that companies are beginning to offer incentives that were once available only to executives or professional athletes. In every domain of business, executives know that their ability to compete is directly related to their ability to attract, develop, motivate, organize, and retain talented people. Yet the people-related challenges of the business stretch far beyond recruiting and retention. Competing for talent and recruiting the best is not enough, and focusing just on winning the "talent wars" can be damaging to the organization Pfeffer 01. As agility in responding to continual change in technological and business conditions has become critical to success, organizations must strive to create learning environments capable of rapidly adjusting to the changes engulfing them. A critical component of agility is a workforce with the knowledge and skills to make rapid adjustments and the willingness to acquire new competencies. In fact, an agile workforce may reduce some of the stress currently being experienced as a talent shortage. Organizations have attempted to apply many different techniques in their efforts to move toward strategic human capital management. They combine downsizing with restructuring, apply reengineering or process improvement, clearly communicate the organization's mission, improve information sharing, institute employee involvement programs, establish formal complaint-resolution procedures, institute gain-sharing or other incentive plans, emphasize the importance of training the workforce, formalize performance management and feedback processes, perform job or work analysis and design, support job rotation, begin to establish team-based work designs, retrain employees to meet changing demands, provide flexible work arrangements, address diversity issues, conduct formal mentoring programs, and align business and human resource strategies Becker 96, Becker 98, Mirvis 97. What many organizations lack is a framework for implementing these advanced practices. People Capability Maturity Model Framework The People Capability Maturity Model (People CMM) is a tool to help you successfully address the critical people issues in your organization. The People CMM employs the process maturity framework of the highly successful Capability Maturity Model for Software(SW-CMM) Carnegie Mellon University 95 as a foundation for a model of best practices for managing and developing an organization's workforce. The Software CMM has been used by software organizations around the world for guiding dramatic improvements in their ability to improve productivity and quality, reduce costs and time to market, and increase customer satisfaction. Based on the best current practices in fields such as human resources, knowledge management, and organizational development, the People CMM guides organizations in improving their processes for managing and developing their workforce. The People CMM helps organizations characterize the maturity of their workforce practices, establish a program of continuous workforce development, set priorities for improvement actions, integrate workforce development with process improvement, and establish a culture of excellence. Since Excerpted from The People Capability Maturity Model: Guidelines for Improving the Workforce by Deborah Phillips, Bill Curtis, William E. Hefley, Sally A. Miller All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.