What do you use to make headcount planning less painful?

I know this is going to initially bother a lot of software engineers the wrong way but here me out: make a gantt chart and assign resources to each of the tasks. You can add "future hires" to see how much of a work load reduction you get.

Now depending on your work environment you can do one of two things:

- Work environment is still "healthy": Show your gantt chart to your boss as a justification for the resource count addition but highly stress that the dates are not accurate or even valid estimates. That is what a dedicated planning session is for.

- Work environment is not "healthy"/a bureaucracy: Come up with whatever justification you can that validates the number you came up with in a gantt chart (aka parallel construction) but don't show the gantt chart. They will take those numbers as gospel no matter what you say.

Human Capital planning for SMB is being tackled by TONS of startups, but HC planning at the Enterprise level is much less competitive - however a point solution for HC planning will have tremendous difficulty breaking through to the mass market as the consumers of the end result (finance most often) have to cobble together the results from a solution that targets the single HC problem plus multiple other point solutions to actually generate the output desired (fully burdened headcount forecast matched to organizational objectives & a hiring/staffing plan along with other financial objectives driven off of headcount - such as software licenses, facilities space, etc.). Excel/Google sheets are superior here until an ERP is purchased by the organization in which case ALL point solutions become redundant and obsolete (leading to 100% churn for high growth/successful customers).

Our platform allows engineers/entrepreneurs to launch point solutions (meaning it solves one specific use case as compared to breadth of an ERP) to enterprise customers. If you're interested in chatting happy to discuss and help those trying to improve the lives of those trying to disrupt the forecasting & analysis world (regardless of whether it has anything to do with our company).

MS Excel Spreadsheets.

More than the tool, what matters is the discipline of all functions (i.e., departments) agreeing on the business processes such as annual budgeting, quarterly/monthly forecasting, feedback loops to account for recent trends and key program-wise/location-wise assumptions (eg. attrition, shrinkage, training yield, ramp-up/learning curve etc.,).

Then, you build up a bottom-up forecast with those key assumptions that translates to revenue and expenses to build a P&L forecast.

A spreadsheet offers the most flexibility. Again, more than the tool, it is the process and the discipline (includes agreeing on standards, lead-times etc.,).

This culture and practices also varies from organization to organization and in practice, in large organizations, you have the legacy of acquisitions that cause a diverse set of practices. While a common tool might help these organizations streamline and standardize the headcount planning process, the challenges are not technical but human and cultural.

If you're creating any kind of support staff, where you can talk to a real human to get help, then the Erlang-C calculations work incredibly well to predict headcount and schedules.

Excel, but it's painful - as any change's through the year make it very hard to compare and contrast actual to budget (e.g. a simple rate change from a supplier vs adding someone to a team, moving different rate people between teams) and quite challenging to do different scenarios (e.g. impact of different inflation levels for different roles / countries). It is possible but requires a lot of discipline and excel expertise from everyone to make it work. I am exploring using a planning & budgeting tool (anaplan, pbcs).

There are a few different tools and methods that can make headcount planning less painful. One method is to use a tool like Excel or Google Sheets to track headcount data over time. This can help you identify trends and make more accurate predictions. Another method is to create a headcount planning committee, which can help to gather input from different departments and make decisions based on collective data.

Why is it painful for you?

Could you talk more about where you feel the pain? Do you use an org tree and how deep is it? Or do you have a couple pools of people who do similar things? Do you use 'cost centers' and do they fill needs at different levels of your org tree?

Spreadsheets work great because it's trivial to change the data structure, and because I can email/share them to the CFO. If I was to adopt a tool, it would have to at least export to spreadsheet.

We do monthly FTE forecasts and use a web tool called time2submit (www.time2submit.com).

Do whatever the ERP tells me to do.

I’m sure people mean Google Sheets, not Excel, because it’s shareable. Some tips based on my experience: -Search for pre-built sheets to get an idea of how to build things out for your company -Build with ways to easily adjust headcount, salary, start dates -Factor overhead separately from salary -Version control/who’s allowed to edit is important -Know that it won’t go exactly to plan, so don’t worry -Tools like anaplan are just as hard to use as sheets, and cost a lot of money, avoid them for as long as possible