Optimizing IT Talent to Achieve Corporate Objectives

The leadership team of a large global diversified company in the travel industry came to us with a unique challenge. The travel industry, in general, is under constant pressure to innovate and address increasing cost pressure. In addition to these challenges, the client was going through some major leadership changes. The company wanted to gain an intimate understanding of its total IT talent pool with the goal of optimizing support of the organization’s critical business objectives.

We gave our client a framework to optimize its IT talent strategy based on business value.

As we engaged with the client and mapped out their workforce, we quickly realized that its full workforce went well beyond its employees to include partners, traditional service providers, and contractors, but its planning did not address all talent streams. Furthermore, while the client was focused on workforce numbers, missing from their analysis was the value the workforce brings to the organization and whether its workforce was focused on the right things.

Key challenges

Our client was challenged by large concentrations in their offshore and onshore resources. Some of their most expensive talent was working on applications and services that were not valued by the marketplace. The client was unaware that they were facing a retirement cliff with a concentration of senior talent working on critical products and applications.

To help our client to address their IT talent strategy challenges, we focused on:

• Workforce redistribution | After we developed a workforce distribution baseline, we gave our client a framework to redistribute the workforce to focus talent on the most critical applications and services.
• Revising the talent mix | Because their best talent was not necessarily their own employees, we helped them revise the talent mix to ensure continuity. Our client’s distinctly complex programs required different approaches (i.e., waterfall method, agile) and we helped them optimize the approach based on product value and talent availability.
• Future planning | We devised a five-year plan to address attrition rates, anticipated retirements in key programs, third-party contract restructuring, and changing global economies.

The project resulted in three key benefits for our client:

• We gave our client a framework for annual planning that assessed the value specific services offered to the business units and matched resources to value.
• We reoriented our client’s perspective on their workforce to include all sources of talent, as well as to take the analysis beyond HR to optimize workforce value.
• We helped reduce labor application cost by 30% by matching the right internal and external resources with the right projects.

At the start of the project, the client was trying to address its challenges through traditional sourcing. We helped our client realize it needed to reorient its IT talent strategy around the value the service organization was bringing to the lines of business and, in turn, the value the lines of business brought to the broader market.