Human Resources

Budgeting Season Begins: Creating a Strategic HR Project Plan

/ September 21, 2022 September 21, 2022

As many organizations are headed into strategic planning and budget meetings for 2023, this is the perfect time to evaluate your Human Resources (HR) and Talent-related needs or priorities for next year. While identifying the problems is easy, creating a plan for solving them and determining the appropriate investment is often the greater challenge. Questions you may find yourself asking are:  

  • Do we need to add to our HR team? At what level? How much will that cost? 
  • Do we need to invest in technology?  
  • Can we reallocate existing resources, or better utilize systems that are already in place?  
  • Do we have the knowledge and skills internally to execute our plans? 

Take the time to do a strategic analysis of your HR and Talent priorities and make a detailed project plan and timeline for how to address them. Considering including the following elements in your analysis: 

  1. Conduct a Needs Assessment & Gap Analysis. Understand what is currently getting in the way of addressing your priorities. Analyze your processes and technology solutions to determine if they are aligned to your needs. Identify what needs to be adjusted. 
  1. Re-examine your HR Team. Identify how you want your HR team to partner with the organization at a strategic level. Work backward to examine how their time is spent today, and whether you have enough or the right people focusing in the right areas to execute on your vision.   
  1. Review Employee Skillsets. Analyze the knowledge, skills and experience of your team and identify where you may be better suited to bring in a subject matter expert. Areas like Compensation Benchmarking, Performance Management, Learning & Development or DEI may require outside expertise to effectively deliver on your goals. 
  1. Gather Proposals from External Resources. Scope out the projects and systems that could benefit from outside expertise or new vendors.  
  1. Build a Timeline. Tackle small scale, large impact projects first. Identify the areas that will create bandwidth for larger projects and prioritize them. Create a timeline for each project or process and map out the year. Be mindful of competing operational priorities and how they may impact your timeline.  

At Exude Human Capital, we understand the deep relationship between strategy and talent; you need both to create transformation, which comes from intentional focus in direction and change. As you prepare for budget season and plan for your next investment into your talent strategy, our HR Leadership Advisors are here to help you in processing, prioritizing, and planning your activities, guided by compliance, culture and inclusion. This partnership is a combination of business advisor, executive coach and change catalyst, that will result in an organized and detailed plan with key focus areas that are aligned with the organization’s direction.