Getting Started with Scenarios

ChartHop Scenarios are designed to be flexible and to support your needs for any forward-looking planning around your organizational structure or your people.

Scenarios were created to streamline the planning processes and give stakeholders one platform to create, approve, execute, and most importantly, iterate on headcount plans as business conditions change.

Before building in ChartHop, take the following into consideration:

1. What question(s) am I trying to answer?

We recommend starting with one key question and objective. For example:

• If we secure our series B for $10mm, how should we ramp up our growth plan?
• If we lose our top 2 managers, what will our sales leadership structure look like next year?
• If sales decrease by 15%, where can I make cuts to our future hiring plan?
• If we need to launch a new product in 2 months, how does the org need to evolve?

2. Do I have access to the data I need?

Depending on your questions, what data do you need to combine and visualize to make the best decisions? For example:

• If you're asking "How should we ramp up our growth plan?", consider looking at Monthly cost by operating group (R&D vs. S&M)
• If you're asking "What will our sales leadership structure look like next year?", consider looking at Nine-box ratings viewed by attrition-risk
• If you're asking "Where can I make cuts to our future hiring plan?", consider looking at Average projected cost for all open roles by department
• If you're asking "How does the org need to evolve in the next year?", consider looking at the Ratio of Engineering headcount to Product headcount

3. Who do I need to collaborate with?

Who needs to be involved at every stage of the process -- from data capture to decision making?

Keep the following in mind:

• Managers on the front-line have the most up-to-date pulse on the performance, potential, and risks on their team. Consider including them as a phase 1.
• Finance & HR/People teams need to be in lock-step to align on budgets and data-driven insights. Clearly define the stages in your planning or scenario building process and who owns/contributes/has visibility into which pieces of the pie.

Once you go through these steps, you're ready to start modeling our your Scenarios in ChartHop!

With Scenarios, you can build sandbox views for alternate hiring plans, projected M&A outcomes, department-specific views, org-wide compensation planning, and more. After you’ve designed plans, it’s easy to deploy them into action within ChartHop or export them into a desired .csv structure and use in any way.

If you have ideas for new features or questions on how to best use Scenarios, please reach out to success@charthop.com.