Service Management Functions

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	Document Purpose
	Executive Summary
	Process and Activities
	Roles and Responsibilities
	Relationship to Other Processes
	Contributors

Document Purpose

This guide provides detailed information about the workforce management service management function (SMF) for organizations that have deployed, or are considering deploying, Microsoft technologies in a data center or other type of enterprise computing environment. This is one of the more than 20 SMFs defined and described in Microsoft® Operations Framework (MOF). The guide assumes that the reader is familiar with the intent, background, and fundamental concepts of MOF as well as the Microsoft technologies discussed.

An overview of MOF and its companion, Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF), is available in the Introduction to Service Management Functions guide. This overview guide also provides abstracts of each of the service management functions defined within MOF. Detailed information about the concepts and principles of each of the frameworks is also available in technical papers available at http://www.microsoft.com/solutions/msm/.

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Executive Summary

Workforce management ensures the attraction, development, and retention of an appropriately trained and prepared IT operations workforce that is crafted to perform the day-to-day operations tasks and functions of an organization's computing environment. Workforce management also addresses environmental issues in order to provide a safe, efficient, and predictable workplace environment.

Key benefits of workforce management are:

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Process and Activities

Workforce Management Overview

Workforce management is concerned with recruiting and retaining staff to meet the needs of the operations organization. This is dependent upon the size, IT architecture, and the specialized needs and sophistication of the organization. It is also dependent on the organizational model implemented within the organization.

Staffing Levels and Skill Sets

Once the IT architecture and specialist needs are understood, then workforce management must understand the business needs, based on the SLA and the computing requirements of the organization, before it can establish the correct level of staffing requirements. Understanding the correct staffing and skill levels needed is an ongoing process so that staff or skill shortages do not occur unexpectedly.

Hiring the right staff who possess the appropriate skills sets and who will work well as part of a team is the main responsibility of the human resources manager.

Having the right staff with the appropriate skill sets can be achieved by ensuring that staff members are rewarded for their contributions. In addition, providing excellent training schemes (training profiles should exist for each job description), certification programs, and enhanced career prospects and career paths increases hiring success. (Such policies and programs should be established before problems arise and staff loses occur.)

One of the most critical (and most often neglected) aspects of managing a workforce is the process of conducting an ongoing skills inventory of the staff. Taking a regular inventory of current skill sets across the operations workforce helps identify areas of weakness.

Employee Retention

A stable workforce is crucial to maintaining service levels. Employee retention is the cornerstone of workforce stability. It also leads to increased productivity over time and improved customer service. An effective workforce plan is therefore needed to retain employees (reduce turnover) by using proactive retention techniques that give the employee incentives to remain in the workforce. Hiring the right people is of no value if the organization cannot retain them over time.

Employee Absence

The human resources manager should use consistent attendance management policies to deal effectively with unplanned absence. The policies should clearly define expectations of attendance and proper notification procedures, as well as the disciplinary measure(s) that will be taken against staff who are absent beyond tolerable limits. In order for this policy to be credible and successful, it needs to be communicated to all staff and applied uniformly throughout the organization.

Absence can be planned or unplanned and may not necessarily reflect poor health by the person who is absent. Whether planned or unplanned, employee absence has a detrimental effect on the services provided by the entire workforce to the organization. Nevertheless, employee absence is a reality in any workforce and needs to be accepted and planned for.

Performance Management

The human resources manager must develop a high-quality performance management system for the support staff by giving them specific goals to attain—goals that are measurable, appropriate, and fully support the SLAs. He or she must ensure that all employees understand the goals and that the employees obtain feedback in order to develop their goals.

Environment

The workplace environment can play an important role in the retention of service and support staff. Since personnel availability is key to the success of an efficient and service-oriented workforce, employees are often required to stay at their workstations for extended periods. A functional workspace that provides for elements like acoustic balance, ergonomic workstations, and an efficient and clean overall atmosphere increases employee satisfaction and their feelings of "wanting to be there."

External Resources

Contracted resources may form part of a short- or long-term staff augmentation; familiarizing them with company policies and procedures provides a seamless and trouble-free staff augmentation experience.

It is the responsibility of the human resources manager to ensure that every support professional, whether internal or external, has a clear understanding of the support organization's goals, processes and procedures, tools, success and measurement metrics, and measurement process.

Goals and Objectives

The primary purpose of workforce management is to ensure that the correct level of staff are recruited and retained to manage the operational production environment. In addition, processes and procedures should be in place to make sure that the staffing requirements remain at the correct level. Once staff members are employed, it is the responsibility of workforce management to continuously manage the staff, skills sets, and objectives so that the correct level of staff is retained.

Scope

Workforce management is concerned with ensuring that the correct level of staff is employed and maintained within the operational production environment in order to ensure that the stated business requirements are consistently met. To recruit and retain staff, the following needs should be considered:

Workforce management has a strong relationship with service level management, availability management, service continuity management, capacity management, problem management, and print and output management in ensuring that the correct level of trained staff are in place and retained in order to meet the correct level of operational and business requirements.

Key Definitions

Best practices. An optimal set of procedures and functional principles that, when followed, produce superior system reliability, availability, supportability, and manageability resulting in effective IT service management.

Certification. An officially recognized professional qualification. Usually an industry standard benchmark for technical achievement—for example, Microsoft® Certified Professional or Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer.

Environment. Normally, the definition is: a collection of hardware, software, network communications, and procedures that work together to provide a discrete type of computer service. There may be one or more environments on a physical platform—for example, test and production. An environment has unique features and characteristics that dictate how they are administered in similar, yet diverse, manners. In workforce management, environment means the surroundings and conditions in which employees work.

Ergonomics. The study of the efficiency of staff in their working environment.

Hiring. Recruiting employees.

Induction. A formal introduction to a new job or organization. New employees are given an overall picture of the organization, its culture, and business and working processes and procedures.

Job description. The analysis of the essential factors of a particular job or task and the qualifications and training needed to carry it out.

Retention. Employing and keeping current staff.

Return on investment (ROI). A benefit realized from an investment—for example, the ROI for spending on staff training would be: staff retention, skilled staff, less absence due to stress, the ability to meet the business requirements, and so on.

Major Processes

Workforce management comprises six main processes and a number of subprocesses as follows:

Figure 1: Workforce process flow diagram

Crafting an Operations Organization

This next section discusses various issues related to building the production operations organization. In this section, the methods for determining staffing requirements, training and retention, and external staffing options are discussed.

Determining Staffing Requirements

Determining operations staffing needs is wholly contingent upon the size, IT architecture, specialized application support needs, and sophistication of the organization.

Operations Organization Makeup Considerations

It is important to understand the staffing requirements, based upon the overall size and architectural distribution of the organization. Smaller, more centralized companies are able to allocate fewer human resources to provide the operational and customer-oriented services necessary to meet the agreed service level agreements (SLAs), whereas larger, more distributed organizations must out of necessity provide more resources to meet their agreements.

With respect to size and architectural considerations, it is difficult to be solidly prescriptive regarding quoting actual numbers of resources because there are critical factors within each of these areas that dictate how large the operations workforce must be. These are described as follows (however, this is not a comprehensive list—an organization might have additional drivers that affect the size of the workforce required to execute and deliver its agreements):

In addition to the organization's size and IT architecture, the need to support specialized applications must also be considered when determining workforce needs. The human resources manager should take note of the custom and specialized applications that are being supported and delineate the specialized support requirements associated with each. The number and location of users who are involved in running these applications (as discussed above in the context of size and architecture) also affects support needs.

Finally, the sophistication of the environment plays a role in determining workforce requirements. The kind of technology platform being supported, with platforms ranging from simple to complex, is a major factor in the sophistication of the environment and affects support needs. Organizations that perform reasonably simple office automation or data entry tasks require a less sophisticated support organization, often consisting of staff members with more generalized skills. Conversely, organizations with more sophisticated and/or distributed computing environments—with disparate product offerings or custom or highly specialized applications—require an operations workforce that's scaled and trained appropriately to meet the demands of the organization.

Predicting Staffing Levels

Having considered the organizational size and sophistication, IT architecture, and specialized application support needs to determine workforce requirements, the human resources manager also needs to understand the importance to the business of providing adequate and appropriate support for all defined service coverage areas in order to plan staffing levels. This includes understanding what it will cost the business if any element of defined support fails to meet the desired goals or requirements.

While human resources are a significant business expense, allowing any aspect of the business to fall down because the right support is not available when required ultimately costs the business more in terms of lost sales, lost product or service revenue, lost productivity, lost customer confidence, or even lost customers. A lack of appropriate support can also have a negative impact upon the internal employees of the company, affecting their morale and productivity.

Therefore, staffing levels should be wholly adequate to meet the support needs of the business at all times. While it is difficult to predict exactly how many staff to add to the operations workforce, there are thumbnail guidelines that take into account the considerations discussed earlier to assist the human resources manager in making these determinations. These are as follows:

Hiring and Retention Considerations

With the required number of operations staff defined, the human resources manager needs to ensure that the proper skill sets have been applied to the proper services. Assessment and analysis of the workforce, as well as the changing support needs of the organization, may require the human resources manager to re-educate, reallocate, or hire/outsource new resources to adequately meet the support needs of the enterprise. The human resources manager looks at the services required, the allocated budget, return on investment (ROI) analysis, and related SLAs and perform a gap analysis to identify areas for improvement.

Employee skill areas include:

Attracting, Developing, and Keeping Strong IT Operations Staff

Attracting and retaining a strong operations staff is critical to running a cost-effective and efficient IT organization. This applies not only in corporate enterprises, but also within the proliferation of online businesses as brick-and-mortar stores create their online presence.

Now more than ever, IT is changing the way everyone does business, and the rate of change is increasing at a spectacular rate. With the rapid evolution toward online sales and services requiring technically astute knowledge workers, competition in the IT industry to attract and keep the best-qualified and most talented workers has always been keen. In order to attract and keep these workers, good compensation is not only a key factor, but also a basic assumption. As a result, salaries and benefits for IT professionals have increased substantially in the last few years.

To truly give merit to the value of IT operations staff, companies must address a key cultural issue. Historically, many companies viewed developers as the elite of the technical staff. They were the visionaries and the doers of the "cool" technical work. When complete, code would be handed over to the operations groups to just run it. Or, in software companies such as Microsoft, the majority of the code developed in years past was put in a shrink-wrapped box and shipped to partners and customers to integrate and operate.

But with the Internet, e-business, more mature and complex IT solutions, and particularly the new "Extranet" model that enterprises are embracing to do business together, operations is changing its role and becoming the very heart and soul of the organization. It can positively or negatively impact virtually every aspect of the business.

Evidence of the growing importance of IT operations includes the recognition of the need for certification programs for its practitioners. As an example of a company that has a strong commitment to developing operations professionals, Microsoft has been very successful in establishing benchmarks for technical certification. Individuals value these certificates because of the training, skills growth, and career opportunities they represent, and organizations acknowledge their value by offering higher salaries to certified than to non-certified IT professionals. This makes it challenging for employers to retain these individuals after they obtain certification, and special attention must be given to valuing and keeping these individuals.

Microsoft's Approach to Employee Attraction and Retention

A longstanding Microsoft internal human resource group principle is "ADK"—attract, develop, and keep—its greatest asset: people. Managing a team of operations personnel requires effective combinations of recruitment, retention, and ongoing retraining.

One obvious but often underestimated key to retention is the importance of hiring the right people in the first place. A bad hire in an IT group occupies a critical headcount in what is likely to be an understaffed area to begin with, and that bad hire is not only under-performing in his or her own workload but requiring the extra effort of peers to stay afloat as well. Take the time to interview well and carefully, and make use of benchmark lists of interview questions and responses and scores that enable one to compare candidates objectively. When evaluating candidates, also keep in mind the importance of "fit and finish" criteria for selecting the kind of person the group needs.

Retraining and continual technical education are so important in keeping top IT staff that industry surveys show that this is one of the top five factors in staff retention. In addition to the direct positive effect on employees, it has indirect benefits for the business. By enhancing employees' product and technical skills, training also helps the business of IT function more efficiently because it exposes employees to the most recent advancements in technology, automation, and cost-containment. Supporting employees in staying current with technology also helps in boosting customer satisfaction and management of customer relationships because the right technical skills, combined with efficient systems, frequently provide quicker resolution to problems and service requests.

There are a number of "retention frameworks" that have been published for the IT industry to help address the labor shortage. Some easily reusable best practices that have been shown to help in retaining top IT staff include:

Proper Employee Orientation

To ensure the effectiveness of new staff when moving into the operations workforce, they must be properly educated in the policies and procedures of the organization and, more specifically, the department, group, or function in which they perform their support duties. First, define and explain customer relationship management and professionalism standards. Next, familiarize the new staff with incident management, problem management, and other related processes. Slowly bring the new resource into the support organization. Allow time for proper integration with the existing team. As the new staff member becomes acclimated, gradually increase responsibilities until the new person has become fully productive.

Job Descriptions

The human resources manager must create clearly defined job descriptions to aid in clarifying roles and responsibilities during both the orientation process and actual job function and execution. Job descriptions also aid in successful career path training because they give the employee an indication of the available positions that exist, helping this person to "target" the best future fit and direction. Job descriptions should integrate with existing roles and responsibilities documentation.

Workforce Skills Assessment

One of the most critical (and most often neglected) aspects of managing a workforce is the ongoing skills inventory of staff. Taking a regular (typically quarterly at a minimum) inventory of current skill sets across the operations workforce helps identify areas of weakness.

For example, in a site with several database servers, having only one administrator capable of managing the servers introduces a single point of failure. Training another member of the staff and familiarizing that member with the current configuration and procedures to maintain and administer these servers mitigates the risk.

Another more classic example of using skill inventories as a tool to ensure the adequacy of staffing resources occurs in the context of the change management process. When changes are made to various aspects of the network that directly affect users, support staff who interface with the various support groups, help desk, and especially users need to be aware of these changes and prepared for them through appropriate training mechanisms. In some cases, staffing (number of human resources) may need to be increased to meet the increased demands that naturally result (however temporarily) from the changes.

When shortages of skills are identified in the primary site, steps must be taken to reduce single points of failure in reference to skills. Because the IT market is competitive, allocating and keeping resources is a difficult, industry-wide problem. The worse case scenario is that the individual with a critical skill(s) leaves the company, with no replacement readily available.

When reviewing skills at a given site, proper procedural documentation can supply the needed information required to repair or restore a system. When the site staff is not prepared to respond to a failure or service interruption event, it is important to have human resource contingency plans that provide for more qualified staff to travel to the site to effect repairs. An organization can go so far as to implement service travel agreements between sites that will potentially share resources. Even with travel agreements, there may be situations that affect a geographical area that may leave an individual unable to fulfill the travel requirement.

Partnering with a local vendor or vendors for resources ahead of time may be an option. While skill inventories should be performed periodically in any organization, skill inventories may occur more frequently within organizations that experience a great deal of turnover, which brings up the issue of staff retention.

Workforce Retention Management

A stable workforce is crucial to maintaining service levels. Employee retention is the cornerstone of workforce stability. It also leads to increased productivity over time and improved customer service. An effective workforce plan is therefore needed to retain employees (reduce turnover) by using proactive retention techniques that give the employee incentives to remain in the workforce. Hiring the right people is of no value if the organization cannot retain them over time.

To retain employees, the human resources manager must provide a stable work environment with adequate ergonomic and environmental resources. The human resources manager should also institute policies for career path planning and ongoing skills development for employees. To ensure that these retention techniques are being utilized, the human resources manager should be able to:

Employee retention techniques represent an investment by the organization in employees. Compare the costs of keeping an employee from leaving (retention costs) with the costs of losing and replacing an employee (replacement costs) before considering retention strategies.

Employee replacement costs are significant cost factors in workforce management. They include recruiting and education, as well as the learning curve for new staff to become fully productive. They also include any related separation costs of the employee who is leaving. To determine the true costs of replacing an employee, perform an ROI analysis to clearly define the total cost of providing services and the expected utilization and productivity levels for each resource.

Managing Workforce Absence

Absence represents the loss of productivity of an employee for a given period. Absence can be planned or unplanned and may not necessarily reflect poor health by the person who is absent. Whether planned or unplanned, employee absence can have a detrimental effect to the organization because of the impact on the services provided by the workforce.

Employee absence is a reality of any workforce and needs to be accepted and planned for. Planned absence can be managed by setting limitations on the number of team members absent from a particular workforce department or segment at a given time. Unplanned absence needs to be understood through root cause analysis and limited to the greatest extent possible. The human resources manager needs to be aware of the triggers and causes of employee absence in order to best manage it.

There are many factors strongly associated with unplanned absence. The main causes can be viewed as occurring in four distinct areas:

The human resources manager should use consistent attendance management policies to deal effectively with unplanned absence. The policies should clearly define expectations of attendance and proper notification procedures, as well as the disciplinary measure(s) that will be taken against staff who are absent beyond tolerable limits. In order for this policy to be credible and successful, it needs to be communicated to all staff and applied uniformly throughout the organization.

Unplanned absences are more difficult to manage than planned absences. They represent all the possible reasons (typically personal in nature) for employees to be away from work. Employees normally report these absences as health related, but the human resources manager is faced with the challenge of determining their true cause. Possible causes for morale-related absences include personal issues, professional dissatisfaction, interpersonal conflict, or a mismatch of capability and authority for the employee. The human resources manager should identify these potential morale issues and develop a plan to resolve them.

It's important for the human resources manager to create a positive and successful atmosphere in an open and communicative environment. Schedule frequent staff meetings that provide opportunities for communication to take place and keep the focus of all meetings in a positive vein.

Planned absences consist of holiday time, vacation time, and time spent away from work due to meetings, educational pursuits, seminars, or other planned activities. While not symptomatic of performance issues themselves, planned absences still need to be managed through proper staff level management techniques to ensure an adequate distribution of resources in the workforce at all times.

Workforce Performance Considerations

This next section describes the various elements associated with staff performance management. This includes setting realistic and achievable objectives, monitoring and measuring performance, evaluating performance, and the all-important consideration of rewards and recognition.

Individual and Group Objective Setting

Setting high-quality performance standards and SLAs alone does not guarantee quality service. If no internal measurements are established, an operations workforce has no way to benchmark or achieve performance goals. Managing the development of support staff becomes increasingly difficult if there is no way to gauge performance. Performance cannot be gauged fairly if the staff does not know what the performance objectives are.

The human resources manager must develop a high-quality performance management system for the support staff by giving them specific goals to attain—goals that are measurable, appropriate, and fully support the SLAs. He or she must ensure that all employees understand the goals and related measurements.

Staff understanding of the correlations between the set service objectives and the corresponding impact to the business by achieving or not achieving those objectives is important to their perception of the importance of their roles. Objectives should have a direct impact on the organization. When the staff views and understands this connection, the relevance of their jobs is enforced, and they see that they are empowered to make a difference in the organization.

Performance management also serves as a feedback mechanism as managers meet one-on-one with staff to discuss both successes and failures. This is a great opportunity for employees to understand their strengths along with their weaknesses. A manager can use this performance management time to aid in career development.

Performance Monitoring and Metrics

Metrics represent the targets for workforce service provisioning. Reports are the end result of the service delivery process—the information that informs the operations workforce, customers, and management how well or how poorly support entities performed against their objectives. Measurement refers to the methods that are employed to tie the two together and represents the actual results of the workforce's performance objectives. That is, it refers to both the process of measuring and the outcome of the measuring process.

Performance observations (the methods that measurement uses) may be done in any combination of, and to any level of, these three methods:

Performance Measurement

Support staff performance is measured in many ways. Performance measurement can and should be done at all levels:

Although the levels of performance being measured may vary and the types of performance reports that are generated relative to service measurements may be different between individuals or groups, there are three key areas that should be measured:

The human resources manager must set the criteria for evaluating and measuring individual and team performance with respect to these basic tenets.

Performance Evaluation

Employees need feedback in order to develop. The operations workforce needs operations professionals that continually develop in order to be successful. A formal performance evaluation system that facilitates both the feedback and employee development processes is critical to establishing a successful workforce.

Appreciation and recognition for performance strengths are important (this is discussed below in the "Reward and Recognition Considerations" section). At the same time, constructive critical evaluations of performance deficiencies are just as important to employee development. The human resources manager uses the evaluation process to recognize employee contributions, areas of improvement, and areas in need of improvement. The employees use the evaluation information to understand where their strengths and weaknesses lie. It is the shared responsibilities of the human resources manager and the operations professional to craft a plan that helps the employee improve where needed.

Most organizations have specific vehicles that they use to evaluate performance. Some of these are so general that they cannot adequately address the detailed technical evaluation of an operations professional. Most deal exclusively with the "soft-skills" and don't account for technical competencies. In these cases, it is up to the human resources manager to include some evaluation items that address specific skills not covered in the general evaluation form. Some examples of these are:

There are many other performance areas that should be documented specific to the particular workforce environment. The point is that employee evaluations should be performed, be relevant to both the company and the employee, and provide the direction to the employee that will foster employee growth.

Reward and Recognition Considerations

The human resources manager must identify and create all formal and informal individual and team reward and recognition programs in which the operations professionals participate. The human resources manager oversees how staff members participate in the development of the criteria for the awards as well as the determination of what the awards will be. This is known as "skin-in-the-game" and allows the employees to actively participate in their own reward programs.

Considerations for External Resources

Prior to a large deployment, contracting external resources that will assist in the development of the deployment process and familiarizing them with company policies and procedures provides a seamless and trouble-free staff augmentation experience. These contracted resources may be short- or long-term augmentation and may eventually be used for outsourcing of specific IT functions.

It's critical that any contract or staff augmentation resource be brought into the fold in the same manner as full-time employees. This means inclusion in organizational policy and procedure training, staff orientation, close involvement with the team or group where the position will function, inclusion in planning and strategy meetings, and a crystal clear understanding of the baseline goals and objectives of the operations workforce. Organizations that have hired external resources and not included these professionals in the above-mentioned activities always report reduced customer satisfaction and morale problems within the organization.

It is the responsibility of the human resources manager to ensure that every support professional, whether internal or external, has a clear understanding of the support organization's goals, processes and procedures, tools, success and measurement metrics, and measurement process. The human resources manager should assist the employee to function successfully within his or her defined job function.

Maintaining a Ready and Reliable Workforce

This next section describes some of the issues related to making sure operations professionals are adequately prepared to perform their function. This section also addresses ongoing, or continuing, training and touches upon the "career path" element as it relates to employee retention.

Employee Readiness Considerations

It is the responsibility of the human resources manager to ensure that all operations professionals are adequately prepared to execute their function. This means first evaluating all new hires (and existing staff on a go-forward basis) to ensure that they have the foundational skills required to either perform the function or to learn how to perform the function. To oversimplify, one can use three basic criteria when evaluating an individual for a position:

When interviewing and considering an individual for a position, using these three questions, while seemingly simple, can go a long way toward weeding out individuals who, while bright and capable, may not fit into the support team or a specific role or who lack the interpersonal skills needed to achieve excellence in the realm of customer support.

It should be understood that not every individual, regardless of this person's skills and/or qualifications, is right for every role. Some individuals work better in a more isolated, heads-down environment, while others thrive in a more open, team style environment. Its important to be acutely aware of the type of environment in which each professional must perform.

Once an individual is hired or brought in to a position, he or she needs to be properly trained in the disciplines associated with the role.

Operations Professional Training Considerations

It is the responsibility of the human resources manager to ensure that all operations professionals have the proper training for their function or role. This may be as simple as a less senior staff member following a more senior individual for a period of time. Or, there may be classroom or self-study resources made available to develop usable skills for the individual or team. Still further, there may be industry certifications that are required for individuals to perform a specific function (for example, Microsoft Certified Professional or Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer certification for operations professionals dealing with Microsoft-based solutions, Novell Certified Netware Engineer certifications for professionals working in a Novell-based environment, or Cisco certification for individuals dealing with complex network environments).

Whatever the environment, application, customer need, or requirement, It's critical that operations professionals be properly trained and ready to perform their function.

Once baseline training is completed, ongoing training is necessary to keep up with changes in the environment's products, services, solutions, and so on. Its important to continually assess the readiness of the support staff in order to always be prepared to meet the agreed-upon SLAs. Continuous training of personnel ensures the availability of qualified resources to meet dynamic demand.

Balancing Training with Support Requirements

When it comes to staff contingency planning for an organization, the human resources manager needs to carefully balance training with the realistic schedule of support that ensures high-quality levels of service. Most companies have a shortage of support staff and can't tolerate absences due to training and improvement for very long. Because companies need to maintain the skills of the employees that provide needed services, it is important to create a formal policy that allows staff to attend training in a way that customer or support needs are not negatively impacted.

Environmental Considerations

The workplace environment can play an important role in the retention of service and support staff. Since personnel availability is key to the success of an efficient and service-oriented workforce, employees are often required to stay at their workstations for extended periods of time. A functional workspace must provide for elements like acoustic balance, ergonomic workstations, and an efficient and clean overall atmosphere.

The human resources manager must ensure that the workstation environment is conducive to consistent, high-quality service—one that allows the staff to work in reasonable comfort. Often, the organization's environment is the intangible quality that retains or loses a borderline dissatisfied employee.

Employees are most efficient, effective, and satisfied in an ergonomically designed work environment. High-quality workforce performance is aided by:

Stress in the workspace environment can be relieved through consistent and easy access to information and tools required for the performance of duties. Communication between the human resources manager, individuals, and staff teams should also be easily achieved in order to promote cooperation and communication.

Employee Safety

Providing for a safe workplace is absolutely critical and is the responsibility of the human resources manager. It's beyond the scope of this document to discuss safety considerations and the associated legal implications. Nevertheless, this is an important feature of workforce safety.

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Roles and Responsibilities

Principal roles and their associated responsibilities for workforce management have been defined according to industry best practice. Organizations might need to combine some roles, depending on organizational size, organizational structure, and the underlying service level agreements existing between the IT department and the business it serves.

Human Resources Manager

The role of the human resources manager is to oversee all activities having to do with workforce management. The responsibilities of the human resources manager include:

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Relationship to Other Processes

Workforce management is one of the foundational Microsoft Operations Framework service management functions (SMFs) and occurs within the optimizing quadrant of the four-phase MOF process model.

MOF recognizes that running IT operations successfully is a prerequisite to achieving business success in the competitive marketplace. The optimizing quadrant specifically addresses this truth by focusing on two fundamental elements of operations—business-focused service level management and cost.

The mission of service for this quadrant is to reduce costs while maintaining or improving service levels. This is accomplished through the management and negotiation of service levels and the evaluation of several key operational metrics in the managed environment. These include such items as capacity, throughput, response times, saturation levels, availability, cost, and revenue. With a thorough evaluation and subsequent understanding of these operational attributes, the IT staff moves from simply "running" a system to proactively managing a service solution.

Figure 2: Relationship to other processes in the Optimizing quadrant

Service Level Management

Service level management itemizes the needs of IT services users. The IT department then creates infrastructure design plans based on this information in order to address the needs of the users. These needs can be broken down into a set of "foundational SMFs," including service continuity management, availability management, capacity management, and workforce management. Each SMF creates a thin design for an IT solution that meets the needs of the users. Workforce management deals with crafting the support organization necessary to fulfill the requirements itemized within service level management.

Service Continuity Management

If an entire network infrastructure is incapacitated due to a catastrophic disaster, a solid service continuity plan can mean the difference between losing a couple of days worth of work and losing months, or even years, of work. A properly prepared and staffed workforce enables and facilitates the execution of the service continuity plan.

Availability Management

Availability management discusses the fundamental and overall availability of the systems and solutions implemented to meet the needs of the organization. Workforce management ensures and addresses all staffing issues relevant to meeting the availability targets.

Capacity Management

Capacity management creates upgrade plans necessary to meet the computing requirements of the organization. Workforce management assists this function by providing administrative and operational support for the monitoring and management of all capacity components.

Problem Management

When specific problems involving single or multiple systems occur on the network, problem management works to determine the cause(s) and to find and implement a solution. Workforce management assists this function by providing human resources at the problem location with the access and authority to effect the solution.

Print and Output Management

Print and output management is responsible for providing services to customers in the most efficient manner possible. Efficient print and output management can help the organization avoid unnecessary hardware costs while providing improved customer support. Workforce management can assist with the administrative operation and management of the print and output resources to ensure that customer needs are efficiently met.

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Contributors

Many of the practices that this document describes are based on years of IT implementation experience by Accenture, Avanade, Microsoft Consulting Services, Fox IT, Hewlett-Packard Company, Lucent Technologies/NetworkCare Professional Services, and Unisys Corporation.

Microsoft gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance of these organizations in providing material for this document.

Program Management Team

Jeff Yuhas, Microsoft Corporation

William Bagley, Microsoft Corporation

Lead Writer

Stephen Barnard, Microsoft Corporation

Contributing Writer

Vicky Howells, Fox IT

Editor

Patricia Rytkonen, Volt Technical Services

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