By now, you’ve probably our series of “13 for 2013” articles on best practices in the world of contingent workforce management. If you’ve missed it, check out Parts One, Two and Three to catch up on this series. Today, we’ll close it out with the fourth and final entry.

Over the course of our “13 for 2013” series on contingent workforce management, we’ve discussed a wide variety of strategies and solutions for managing the contemporary contingent workforce umbrella, everything from analytics and reporting, outsourced technology to why SOW-based projects and services must be a program focus for the modern enterprise.

And now, here are our final three best practices in contingent workforce management:

• Take a deep breath and understand that a one-shot strategy does not exist. While specific technology or third-party solutions are an ideal form of gaining assistance in managing the complexities of the umbrella, the fact of the matter remains that there’s no single internal strategy that can cure all contingent workforce woes. Instead, the typical executives must look to a variety of internal competencies and build those together under a single banner to build an effective program. Collaboration between HR and procurement, robust quality metrics / performance-tracking, a positive attitude towards the trend of project-based work…all of these and many more will go a long way towards streamlining the umbrella’s vehemently complex attributes.
• The future is always, always right up ahead. “Knowing” is better than being surprised. I mentioned during this series that analytics and intelligence were the major keys to the future of the contingent workforce management function, and this aspect isn’t going to change anytime soon. Leverage the intelligence gleaned from reporting / analytics to forecast the utilization of contract talent in the months ahead. Knowing what services or contractors you’ll need six or twelve months from now based on past information can significantly help the CFO manage the corporate budget…and thrust whomever is managing the contingent workforce program into a more accessible and strategic light.
• Remember that the category has been evolving for years…and it could shift again sooner than we think. The history of contingent workforce management is wrought with sharp change, from a simple indirect spend category (that elicited more procurement attention than anything else) to one that touches all avenues and divisions within the greater organization and now includes other complex components that even the most advanced companies years ago could have never imagined. The umbrella is most certainly the “now” of contingent workforce management, but it may not necessarily be the future of the category. SOW and services could shift out of the umbrella and into its own corporate universe, while new solutions and approaches may leave the current offerings far behind toand struggling keep pace. The point is this: we live in an age in which the current baseline is in all likelihood a temporary plateau in a much longer journey. With contingent workforce management growing at an alarming rate (I predicted in this USA Today article that CWM could eventually approach as much as one-third of the modern organization’s total workforce), enterprises around the world (even the leaders in this space) will be forced to rethink their best practices and strategies.

Thanks for reading this best practices series…and, of course, stay tuned for more articles here at CPO Rising that will continue to track the evolution of contingent workforce management and pinpoint exactly where this space is headed.

Tagged in: Category Management, Christopher Dwyer, Complex Categories, Contingent Workforce, Technology