Cornell University Division of Planning and Budget

• Workforce Planning Overview
• Objectives
• Process
• Functions Reviewed
• Accomplishments
• Key Principles Learned
• Resulting Actions

Workforce Planning Resulting Actions

While the workforce planning effort accomplished more than many expected, its most significant impact is that it has set in motion a continuing institution-wide focus of review and improvement of operational support activities.

Next Steps: Meeting the Continuing Challenges of Stewardship and Accountability

Success in sustaining effective and efficient support operations, and ultimately success in meeting stewardship responsibilities, is largely dependent on operating practices, structures, relationships, and incentives that truly enable the academic mission to flourish. Stewardship is too often thought of as a responsibility to preserve and protect resources, but this responsibility extends much further to enabling, advancing, and leveraging the resources entrusted to the university to achieve the greatest good.

Further progress in integrating, coordinating, and redefining support activities across the university is vitally important to ensuring high-quality support to academic programs in the future. We must continue to develop a deeper and more complex understanding of the similarities and differences in support requirements across units and engage in productive review across organizational boundaries and functional areas.

The workforce planning initiative effectively served as the first phase of what needs to be a continuous university-wide effort intent on ensuring agile and responsive systems of support at the lowest possible cost. This initiative has transitioned to an on-going university function, supported out of the Office of Institutional Planning and Assessment in the Division of Planning and Budget, supporting new and continuing planning efforts that address major operating challenges on a university-wide basis.