People Strategy case study

A People Strategy Meets a Calendar That Was Already Full

2delivery risks we were mandated to close
21initiatives, each with its own measures
9HR teams in the workload plan
30months planned, team by team

The situation

The question behind the question.

A new HR platform does not wait. When this group’s board approved one in November 2025, as the enabler of its people strategy, the go-live dates were fixed, and every HR team owed it a share of its time for 30 months. We had built the multi-million business case behind it with the client. The strategy, the client’s own, added 21 initiatives on top. What it did not yet show was how many hours the platform would leave for them. Without that answer, the strategy would not fail in a meeting. It would slip, month by month, without anyone deciding it should.

As it was asked

“Help us activate our people strategy.”

As we reframed it

The strategy did not need more content. It needed 3 answers it did not yet give: what could stop it, how each initiative would show it had worked, and whether the teams had the hours to deliver it.

How we worked

How the work unfolded.

01

Name the risks

We started from the strategy as the client had written it, and asked what could stop it. The answer went to the head of HR as a briefing: 10 delivery risks in 5 areas, each with a mitigation and a status. Several are familiar from any HR transformation: no forum yet owning the trade-offs, change management not resourced, an HR operating model whose end state was still undefined, people data still maturing. The briefing also set the order of delivery: the platform build first, then the initiatives it depends on, then the rest. We were mandated to address 2 of those risks: value realisation and capacity shortages.

02

Measure every initiative

The board had been promised 13 measures, and 2 of the strategy’s 7 objectives had none. With our coaching, the HR team gave every initiative its own indicators, and each had to pass 3 tests: relevant to the objective, controllable by the team that owns it, and technically feasible to produce. Measures already in the platform’s business case were reused, not reinvented. The HR leadership team, the executive committee and then the board validated them in turn. The platform’s own measures also came with targets for project success.

03

Load the calendar

Then the hours. We built the model and coached each of the 9 HR teams through it. First, the workload the platform implementation would demand of each team over 30 months. Then, on top, what every initiative of the strategy would ask. Wherever the sum passed what a team could give, each month of excess needed one of 3 answers: descope, backfill or bring in outside help. The platform’s business case had budgeted its outside implementers, not the hours it would take from HR’s own teams. Before we left, we recommended a forum to arbitrate every excess on a fixed rhythm, with the authority to decide; the client adopted it.

The instrument

A workload plan in 3 layers

The platform. The workload the HR platform implementation demands of each of the 9 teams, month by month for 30 months. It is loaded first, because it cannot move.

The strategy. Each of the 21 initiatives, broken into the effort it asks of each team, month by month, on top of the platform.

The capacity line. Run work fills each team’s week; by working assumption, 20% of each team’s time already went to projects, and that 20% is what the platform and the strategy had to share.

Where demand crosses the line, the excess is named by team and by month, and each excess needs an answer before it arrives: descope, backfill or buy outside help.

What moved

What changed, and what didn't.

>2×the HR capacity the platform and the strategy would need at their peak, seen 15 months ahead
Evidence Decision taken Adopted in practice Measured impact
What moved

The measures were validated in turn by the HR leadership team, the executive committee and the board. The resource plan went to the HR leadership with every bottleneck named by team and by month, 15 months before the peak, when the platform and the strategy together would ask for more than twice the hours the HR teams could give. The platform alone would have filled the calendar for more than a year, before a single initiative of the strategy was added.

What didn't move

The calendar proved its own point: what would take 2 months in a quieter year took 6. Seeing the gap did not close it either. The leadership adopted the forum we recommended to arbitrate it, but whether it works is not yet known, and the strategy’s indicators still have no targets, unlike the platform’s.

What we'd say to a peer

A people strategy is written on a blank page, but it is delivered in a calendar that is already full, often with a system implementation nobody can postpone. Load what is mandatory first, then every initiative, team by team and month by month. Every hour of excess needs an answer before it arrives: descope it, backfill it or buy it in.

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Method note:

Own approach in 3 steps; delivery risk briefing; initiative-level indicator matrix; workload plan by team and month.

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