Modernizing Workforce Planning for a Major Financial Institution
Driving visibility, transparency and a centralized process
Executive Summary
A leading financial institution set out to modernize its operating model, shifting to a product-led structure built around multi-disciplinary teams. But as these new ways of working scaled, the organization faced a major barrier: no single source of truth for how people, teams, and work connected across the enterprise. Fragmented tools, inconsistent processes, and manual spreadsheets left leaders without the visibility needed to make confident, timely decisions.
TeamForm transformed this landscape by becoming the organization’s system of record for teams and workforce planning—bringing transparency, consistency, and real-time insights across 20,000 employees. With integrated org design, dynamic workforce planning, and connected delivery data, leaders can now see how people and capabilities align to strategy instantly.
The impact has been significant:
- Faster decision-making: leaders had comprehensive, real-time workforce insights to guide decisions across the enterprise
- Reduced administrative overhead: manual workforce planning spreadsheets were removed
- Improved accuracy in workforce spend: access to real-time matrixed costs and investment spend, eliminating the need for traditional timesheets
- Substanstial cost savings: accurate, seamless and streamlined org design process, removing blockers on HR
TeamForm now serves as the connective layer linking people, work, and strategy, enabling the bank to operate with greater clarity, agility, and confidence across its entire enterprise.
The pace of change is increasing. Organisations that adapt fast are poised to leapfrog the competition. As ways of working evolve, the method by which outcomes and work are funded must also evolve. However, there is no perfect one-size-fits-all solution, so taking an incremental approach to this change, learning and improving as you go, is the way forward.
"As long as you're in the business that you are in, you need to continuously improve, continuously innovate, 'evergreen' your value offering. Standing still is not standing still, it's going backwards. Not treating Value (Products) as long lived, results in the need to slash and burn, replace at a later date, for a higher cost (here we go again)"
- Jon Smart, Sooner Safer Happier
Organisations are expected to do more with less, unable to commit to projects that may take years to prove value. On the other hand, most people can recall a project that continued to be funded long after it had gone over time, budget and scope, otherwise known as the "
escalation of commitment."
Organisations with a more modern approach adopt long-lived cross-functional teams as part of teams-of-teams (aka value streams) and orient around the flow of value. When capacity is funded rather than the project, there is far less focus on whether the pot of money has been used in full and more on whether the money that has been spent is yielding the outcomes sought.
If we look at the
Tuckman stages of team development: Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing, we understand that teams perform better when they stay together. Teams are the unit of delivery and should be stable, not static.
Teams become high performing over time. Project-based funding eventually breaks teams apart and prevents them from reaching their full potential.
This team-focused approach to funding is usually referred to as an investment hypothesis or bet, to signify that the organisation is investing in solving a problem, rather than in developing a specific solution or set of deliverables. Consumers will tell you (directly or indirectly) if what you have delivered is valuable - your metrics will give you the insights you need.
If an organisation can pivot on its investment hypothesis, it should increase business agility, but this is only the case if teams plan work in thin slices (that can be independently delivered over time - a quarter or less), rather than a deliverable that may span multiple quarters and cannot be stopped halfway. If teams plan and deliver work incrementally, they can rapidly find out if it is generating value, and if not, pivot with little waste. At worst, the next quarter will need adjusting.
For further reading check out
How should I fund agility by our partners at
Sooner Safer Happier.The Challenge
Over time, each Business Unit had developed its own approach to workforce planning - adopting different tools, data structures, and governance practices to suit local needs. While this autonomy allowed flexibility in the short term, it also led to significant fragmentation across the enterprise. Without consistent standards or shared metric definitions, it became increasingly difficult to report on workforce metrics at scale or to plan the right capability mix to deliver on strategic priorities.
As these inconsistencies grew, the organization also became more dependent on institutional knowledge within individual Business Units. Key processes relied on the experience of a few subject matter experts, creating both operational risk and inefficiency. Instead of fostering agility, the operating model became constrained by silos, duplicated effort, and manual workarounds.
The lack of a single source of truth meant leaders couldn’t easily answer fundamental questions: How are teams structured? What capabilities do we have? How do they align to strategic goals? Data was scattered across multiple systems, and updates often relied on spreadsheets and shared documents. These crowd-sourced processes were time-consuming, prone to error, and rarely reflected the current state of the workforce.
The Bottom Line → Impacts to Delivery & Decision Making
Together, these challenges slowed decision-making, reduced agility, and limited the organization’s ability to plan effectively. Maintaining workforce visibility became an ongoing administrative burden, diverting focus away from value creation.
To unlock the full potential of its transformation, the organization needed a unified, data-driven foundation to connect people, work, and strategy across every level of the enterprise.
- Integration with existing data: TeamForm was connected to Tesco Mobile’s HR system and Jira to synchronise people data and work (epics) respectively.
- Data quality uplift: Integration surfaced inconsistencies and inaccuracies in Tesco Mobile’s underlying enterprise data, enabling systematic improvements.
- Team structure upload and validation: As-is Squad and Tribe structures were imported into TeamForm. Leaders were empowered to review and correct team memberships and roles.
- Visibility and usability for all: For the first time, Chapter, Tribe, and Squad leads had a shared, real-time view of their people, roles, and work in one intuitive interface.
"TeamForm immediately showed its value with the visibility, transparency and accountability it brought to our business. This has resulted in much richer, fully informed conversations on requests for additional headcount and internal moves where we move talent to value or personal growth opportunities. This has enabled faster and better decisions for teams and for the business."
— Matthew McBride,
Head of Transformation and Business Agility, Tesco Mobile
The TeamForm Solution
TeamForm was implemented as the system of record for their teams and Team of Teams, initially launching with the Team Directory so that Leaders and Team Members could, for the first time, navigate the organization effectively and understand where individuals were allocated, and what they were working on.
“TeamForm provides us a transparent system. Anyone in the organization can view it. Anyone in the organization can see the structure, anyone in the organization can see if there’s something wrong with it and and help improve it”.
— Product Owner
Org Design activities also shifted to TeamForm, with tens of thousands of people moving into the new ways of working structures. The process was transformed through the availability of accurate and timely information, improved confidentiality and controls.
Building on this foundation, the organization turned its attention to optimizing workforce management and planning practices, replacing static spreadsheets with a dynamic, real-time view of workforce planning and team allocations. This was also enhanced by the ability to link teams to strategy & work, leveraging TeamForm’s integration with the Atlassian suite and other PPM tooling. This shift has enabled leaders to see how people, roles, and capabilities align to work in real time.
The implementation of TeamForm unlocked new opportunities for measurement, reporting, and analytics; for example, reporting on employee engagement at the cross-functional team level where individuals do the work in addition to their traditional reporting line.
By serving as the connective layer between people, work, and delivery tooling, TeamForm’s data fed into the Group’s Ways of Working & Delivery Dashboards, bringing together data from multiple tools to create a cohesive view of performance across teams and Teams of Teams. This not only improved operational visibility but also strengthened strategic planning across the enterprise, now serving as a core input to every Quarterly Business Review.
- Unique Value Proposition: TeamForm was the only platform purpose-built to be the system of record for cross-functional teams, offering value beyond traditional admin tools.
- Enterprise-Wide Usability: TeamForm’s intuitive interface made it easy for everyone—from executives to team leads—to engage with and adopt the platform.
- Rapid Time-to-Value: Thanks to its focus on user experience, TeamForm enabled a fast rollout and strong user adoption across the business.
The Impact: Immediate Value and Enterprise-Wide Adoption
The results of the implementation were immediate and profound:
✅ Connected Ecosystem of Tools, Data and Teams
The implementation of TeamForm helped create a connected ecosystem of tools, data, and teams - linking strategy, structure, and work in a single place. For the first time, leaders had comprehensive, real-time workforce insights to guide decisions across the enterprise.
✅ Centralized Workforce Planning
Manual planning spreadsheets were superseded in Business Units, freeing valuable time for high-impact work. Distribution lists and workforce reports that once took days could now be generated instantly, reducing errors and administrative overhead.
✅ Improved Cost Efficiencies
The new model also delivered measurable cost efficiencies, including ≈$400-$500k reduction in organization design costs per project, while improving accuracy in workforce spend.
✅ Removal of Timesheets
Finance gained an on-demand view of matrixed costs and investment spend, eliminating the need for traditional timesheets.
A Clearer, Smarter Way to Organise for Delivery
With TeamForm, the organization now operates with a single, connected view of its workforce, improving operational efficiency, decision-making, and strategic alignment across the entire enterprise.
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