There is an increasing awareness that federal agencies need to
transform themselves into more efficient, results-oriented
organizations if they are to meet the many fiscal, management, and
policy challenges of the 21st century. To meet these challenges,
federal managers will need to direct considerable time, energy, and
targeted investments toward efforts that make the best use of the
government's most important resource--the people that agencies employ
now and in the future. They will also need effective strategic
workforce planning to identify and focus these investments on the long-
term human capital issues that most affect their ability to attain
mission results. The principles presented here can enhance the
effectiveness of an agency's strategic workforce planning by helping
the agency focus on the issues it needs to address, the information it
needs to consider, and the lessons that it can learn from other
organizations' experiences. By doing so, agencies can better ensure
that their strategic workforce planning processes appropriately address
the human capital challenges of the future and better contribute to the
agencies' major efforts to meet their missions and goals.