Fact Sheet: Integrated Planning

Integrated planning is a process that aligns business goals and the current and future human resources capacity and skills required to support the achievement of these objectives.

Although every manager is responsible for planning within his or her area, integrated plans are often prepared at the branch level and then rolled up into a bigger departmental plan that the deputy head approves.

In the long term, integrated planning ensures that deputy heads have the ability to maintain capacity and achieve organizational goals while having the flexibility to adapt to changing government priorities. Integrated planning ensures that key areas and positions, which are critical to meeting the mandate of the organization, are managed through recruitment, staffing, retention, talent management and succession planning.

An effective planning exercise goes beyond planning for staffing needs. It should allow an organization to:

• forecast the skills and competencies that it will need to develop within its workforce to meet its future priorities;
• identify the organizational and classification requirements needed to ensure that the organizational structure corresponds to current and future priorities;
• ensure that the workforce is representative and that linguistic duality is respected; and
• develop a better understanding of employees’ career interests and plans, including retirement.

Key success factors include:

• revisiting the integrated plan on a regular basis and making adjustments as circumstances change;
• keeping the plan realistic and communicating updates of the plan to employees; and
• ensuring that priorities and objectives identified in the plan are manageable.

By continuing to update the demographic information of your organization, tracking arrivals and departures of employees, and providing timely information on performance measures, you will be able to continue the momentum of a good planning exercise. This will help ensure that your human resources activities support your business needs so that your organization can achieve its goals.