Strategic workforce planning addresses two critical needs: (1) aligning
an organization's human capital program with its current and emerging
mission and programmatic goals and (2) developing long-term strategies
for acquiring, developing, and retaining staff to achieve programmatic
goals. Agency approaches to such planning can vary with each agency's
particular needs and mission. The success of the workforce planning
process that an agency uses can be judged by its results--how well it
helps the agency attain its mission and strategic goals--not by the
type of process used. Nevertheless, existing strategic workforce
planning tools and models and our own work suggest that there are
certain principles that such a process should address irrespective of
the context in which planning is done. (See fig. 1.) These are as
follows:

* involve top management, employees, and other stakeholders in
developing, communicating, and implementing the strategic workforce
plan;