Workforce Planning (WFP) has become a crucial part of the governance of
project-driven companies and has been deemed fundamental to drive critical
decisions on resource management. To manage manpower planning, companies
independently developed internal procedures according to their sector, size, and
skills. Despite the efforts to create a reliable workforce planning process, a lack of
knowledge, standardization and sharing might lead to misalignment and to
heterogeneous approaches among different organizations. This study aims at
investigating the current knowledge of the WFP, pointing at the detection of its key
factors in terms of process steps, application context, methods, input data, actors,
tools and reports’ frequency. Additionally, it attempts to define WFP high-level
guidelines which can be generally valid for project-driven organizations. The
research seeks to meet these goals by combining the results of the academic
literature review on the WFP with the findings of the empirical study in which the
representatives of ten project-based enterprises participated. The paper describes
the key principles of WFP and its main process’ sections, offering high-level
guidelines in terms of recommended process steps, actors involved, operative
models, data input, report’s frequency, and tools. The presented features,
generated by the literature review and the empirical study, are meant to be
generally applicable to project-driven companies and to support the
practitioners initiating this process in their organization
