Dynamic talent planning and forecasting helps Accenture to be collaborative and transparent as we empower our people, deliver innovative solutions to clients, and manage better business outcomes.

1. Dynamic talent planning and forecasting
helps Accenture to be collaborative and
transparent as we empower our people,
deliver innovative solutions to clients,
and manage better business outcomes
TEAMING
WITH TALENT
Copyright © 2020 Accenture. All rights reserved

2. Accenture needs to be agile to provide people with the
right skills at the right place, time and cost. Yet, our
traditional, manual approach to talent planning and
forecasting meant we were unable to dynamically
model, and be responsive to, talent demand.
The impact of a fast-paced digital world is
being keenly felt in the Human Resources
business model. Accenture is structured
across various services and geographic
markets that focus on building and growing
talent, locally and globally,
to meet the needs of our diverse clients and
help them transform their businesses. To
manage increasing complexity, we found it
was becoming harder to drill down at a
granular level, while simultaneously
understanding the impact of changes
across the entire organization. What
is more, Accenture teams found that
multiple processes, inflexible submission
timelines and disconnected tools meant that
the process around talent planning and
forecasting could be difficult, time
consuming and often unproductive.
CHALLENGE
Managing the talent supply chain is
complex and demanding. With nearly half a
million people across more than 120
countries, it was important for Accenture
business leaders to have a single source of
up-to-date information for talent forecasts.
They needed transparency to the talent and
payroll implications of talent scenarios so
that they could feel empowered to make the
right decisions to reflect and respond to the
business landscape—and better prepare for
the future workforce. Following discussions
with our business leaders, Accenture began
a talent supply chain
journey to address these planning and
forecasting
challenges and enable us to be agile and
adaptive to changing circumstances.
Copyright © 2020 Accenture. All rights reserved

3. WHAT ACCENTURE DID
“We’ve enjoyed collaborating with the
Talent Supply Chain team. It’s great to see
how the Accenture Talent Planning tool is
helping HR and our business leaders to be
much better prepared with analytics than in
the past.
SANGITA AGARWAL
Director HR IT, Accenture
A journey to value
Accenture had wanted to automate its talent
management process for several years.
Different technology approaches were
considered to enable the process to be more
agile, but the right kind of technology to
support this effort was simply not available.
The team knew that it needed to focus on
providing clear direction for our various
business areas to guide informed decisions
on the talent actions necessary to achieve
better business outcomes.
In looking at the overall process involved with
an effective talent strategy, Accenture chose
to focus first on detailed talent modeling. The
team was able to evolve from using an Excel
spreadsheet to an award-winning Accenture
Talent Planning tool.
This new cloud-based, dynamic platform was
designed to support Accenture talent decision
makers and Human Resources (HR) business
partners across each of the business units in
all geographies where Accenture operates.
Indeed, it was the business’ willingness to
learn the new capabilities of the technology,
and adapt behaviors, that contributed to its
early success.
The tool is built on Aurora SQL, which is part
of the Amazon Web Services portfolio of
offerings and uses Vue JS front-end
technology. The tool was built over a period of
12 months, using an iterative and agile design
thinking process that included releasing small
components, early and often, to maintain the
project’s momentum. The first release of the
tool went live in December 2018.
Copyright © 2020 Accenture. All rights reserved

4. WHAT ACCENTURE DID
A journey to value (continued)
Unlike the Excel spreadsheet, the tool switched up how HR planning and forecasting was
done—we now drive the process from a people perspective, rather than from a fixed
organizational hierarchy. Our solution tackled existing talent planning and forecasting
supply challenges by:
• Securely putting in place talent
models and workflows that are useful,
relevant and actionable for decision
makers in real time at the level of
detail the business requires.
• Improving the timeliness and
transparency of information to support
forward-looking talent action scenarios
in line with business objectives; this
meant that business leaders could
collaborate on making business
decisions based on the “bigger
picture” supply view across all
geographies.
• Supporting decision makers’ needs for
deeper analysis with more details on
forecasts using algorithms; this meant
forecasters were better able to advise
on talent decisions.
• Improving user experience and
visualization as well as providing
flexibility for business leaders. As
business conditions shifted,
they were able to maintain balance in
the necessary future talent actions
which saw improvements in their
talent strategies, better serving
demand and clarifying skill priorities.
• Making it easier to meet financial
commitments by using automation to
achieve greater visibility of the talent
and payroll implications of forecasted
talent actions. Forecasting for the
various career levels in the company
in the way HR manages talent.
Copyright © 2020 Accenture. All rights reserved

5. TALENT PLANNING
REVOLUTION
LEGACY TOOLS WERE EXCEL-BASED,
TIME-CONSUMING TO UPDATE,
AND LED TO WORK IN SILOS.
Copyright © 2020 Accenture. All rights reserved

6. Fast-track innovation
Today, Accenture is looking for boundaryless opportunities—flexible career paths that
enable our workforce to innovate and our organization to grow and develop. We also
need to account for changing workforce models—to accommodate remote working
and flexible working. The tool not only helps our people adapt to a fluctuating market,
but also feeds into other supply/demand balancing activities. Figure 1 shows how
talent can be planned and forecasted with an infinite input loop, where people can add
information in and gain insights out from the process to better manage their
headcount.
Developing the talent planning solution relied on a close collaboration between global
IT and other areas of the Accenture business. What became clear was that a change
in mindset was necessary as the teams using the solution moved from entrenched
processes to an agile, design-led way of working. This has not only shifted how we do
talent planning, but also put us on the path to transforming our own culture.
Here are some of elements that influenced this cultural shift:
• Adopting an agile mindset toward talent planning.
• Experiencing and exploiting the creative nature of the build.
• Adapting to a design-led development
(possibly the biggest change for our organization).
• Embracing an approach of ongoing experimentation.
PEOPLE AND
CULTURE
Copyright © 2020 Accenture. All rights reserved

7. The Accenture Talent Planning solution
offers HR business partners, HR talent
advisors and business leaders a simple,
intuitive and consumer-like user experience
and brings greater efficiencies to business
leaders as well as new and existing talent.
Using the tool, our business leaders can
be more relevant, more flexible, and
more empowered.
Apart from being welcomed within the
business, the new tool was recognized with
the Brandon Hall Excellence in Technology
GOLD award for Best Advance in an
Integrated Talent Management Platform at
the end of 2019. In short, the Accenture
Talent Planning tool has reinvented how
Accenture leaders work to meet the needs
of a growing—and ever-changing—
business.
VALUE DELIVERED
Reinventing how we work The tool functionality brings transparency and collaboration and is designed to encourage desired behaviors
across the enterprise:
ENABLES
Live forecasts
Decision makers
can see more,
more clearly. The
tool provides a six-
quarter rolling full-
time employee
forecast, updated
monthly with actual
data. Real-time
updates also
enable flexible
forecasting so that
adjustments to
demand can reflect
changes in a
shifting business
context.
SUPPORTS
Forecast
granularity
The solution has
enabled a cultural
shift from seeking out
planned releases to
continuous delivery
of the latest
information. Business
managers and HR
teams can access
their talent forecasts
at the desired level of
granularity.
The tool supports
both
a bottom-up
approach, with local
detail, and top-down,
high-level scenario
modeling.
OFFERS
Visibility on financial
impact
Users have online
access to talent data
24/7 to better support
our business globally.
Built-in role-based
access controls
address visibility
issues and maintain
compliance with the
General Data
Protection Regulations
(GDPR). The tool
provides decision
makers with insight
into how payroll costs
might grow if the
estimated talent plans
are executed. Talent
plans data can be
passed to Financial
teams to enable more
accurate financial
forecasting.
PROVIDES
Context
HR and Business
teams can work on
high-level what-if
scenarios. The
ability to model the
“art of the possible.”
We can adjust talent
levers to reflect
overall growth,
attrition, joiner
percentages, career
levels and payroll
cost implications.
This enables our
business and HR
leaders to check the
feasibility of hitting
targets across all
metrics and
supports future
talent forecast
decision making.
FACILITATES
Collaboration
Being able to connect
talent actions with
labor cost
implications fosters
greater
collaboration—and
harmony—between
HR and Finance
teams. Cross-
functional HR teams
can work together in
a secure, online
environment and
share talent models
to evaluate the
impact of talent
decisions.
Copyright © 2020 Accenture. All rights reserved

8. SANGITA AGARWAL
Managing Director- Global IT, HR Technology
LinkedIn
CHRIS SCHAAF
Managing Director, Global IT, HR Technology
LinkedIn
MEET
THE TEAM
RELATED CAPABILITIES
Enabling IT
Our global IT organization is driving technology-powered business
transformation across Accenture
How Accenture Does IT
Our global IT organization’s capabilities are advancing Accenture’s digital
transformation for the post-digital world.
Copyright © 2020 Accenture. All rights reserved