Workforce Management at the North Pole

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Talent Management  

A couple of years ago I wrote a December article for gantthead about project post mortems that used Santa’s review of the night after Christmas as the recurring theme. It is still one of the articles that I get the most e-mails about, so please forgive me one more moment of indulgence and let’s see what Santa can teach us about workforce management…

So many gifts, so few elves
Santa scratched his head once more as he reviewed the latest gift request summary. Twelve months ago, he had never even heard of an iPad and now he had more than 100 elves producing them non-stop. It seemed like the pace of technology advances was accelerating beyond all belief and it was hard to keep the elves trained in order to keep pace. Before each Christmas production season started, Santa reviewed all of his elves and the skills that they had and then compared that with the work that they would need to conduct.

Santa maintained a skills inventory that showed which elves had which abilities, and then he compared this inventory with the requirements for this particular season. He could quickly identify the key elves that needed to be assigned to some of the critical path tasks, but he could also see that there were some elves that couldn’t be assigned much work because the skills that they had were not needed this year. Those were candidates for training on some …

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