An archetype-based approach to driving your global workforce transformation

This article was co-authored by Michael Bertha, Partner, Metis Strategy, and Ishan Prakash, Manager, Metis Strategy

In today’s ever-expanding digital landscape, in which many IT teams operate across geographies, it’s no secret that your ability to leverage technology to its fullest depends crucially on your workforce composition: on how your resources are allocated across various sourcing models, namely, FTEs, onshore, nearshore and offshore. As technology becomes ever more important to strategy, IT leaders are reconsidering their workforce compositions. Where they once optimized predominantly for cost, they’re now weighing that one variable more carefully against many others, including productivity, digital maturity, and the development of longstanding capabilities. 

And though modeling the composition of a to-be workforce is a necessary and smart first step, it represents only the tip of the iceberg. In other words, it’s unrealistic to redeploy a role as part of a different sourcing model and expect instant productivity gains. Countless variables must be considered: skillset alignment and maturity, time zone differences, and ways of working (both within a team and across the organization), and so on.

Acknowledging these challenges and complexities, how can one pressure-test their spreadsheet exercise against the realities of execution? Drawing from our collaborations with several Fortune 500 clients on this topic, we suggest an archetype-based approach, one that, when executed well, will allow you to charge ahead with implementing your to-be workforce composition, and with the confidence that it reflects the needs of your organization.

Step 1: Assess the demand profile

By shifting the composition of your workforce, you are bound to affect certain functions, capabilities, or products. Begin by understanding those entities’ remit and ways of working. Are they developing novel products and services? Configuring a package solution? What key technologies are they using? What skills will enable operations in the new model? Are they working in agile? If so, what flavor do they employ?

As an example, consider the case of a global retail client. In assessing the demand profile of the team that oversees their fulfillment capability, the client examined their inventory management solution, a niche one, and determined that, even though the company might benefit by bringing the solution’s support team nearshore, the right skills would be hard to find in the short run.