Alicia Roach and the people missing from the plan

Alicia Roach once wrote a letter to strategic workforce planning. She addressed it as a misunderstood friend, offered it some sympathy, and suggested a change of name. A business discipline had acquired a pen pal. It was an unusual way to express a very ordinary professional frustration: the thing she had spent years doing was still being mistaken for something smaller.

Some people heard workforce planning and thought of rosters. Others heard a staffing budget. Roach saw a question sitting underneath the company strategy: what will it take, in people and capabilities, to carry this out? Her career has followed that question from finance departments to corporate HR, into a consultancy and then into eQ8, the software business she co-founded with Chris Hare.

The letter gives a useful introduction to its author. There is impatience in it, but also affection. She is willing to tease the discipline she wants other people to take seriously. Anyone can complain about a misunderstood profession. Giving it advice about its branding requires a certain commitment to the joke.

The accountant crosses the corridor

Roach began in finance as a chartered accountant. She also holds an MBA. The combination matters to the work she later chose: financial modeling asks how assumptions affect outcomes, while workforce decisions ask what an organization can actually accomplish with the people it has. The two questions belong in the same conversation.

Her early corporate work brought her into projects concerning the workforce. An HR leader wanted more commercial and analytical thinking, and Roach moved toward that work. She had found a subject in which the numbers were connected to decisions about people. Strategic workforce planning became her specialty, although it had hardly been a childhood career ambition.

Inside large organizations, she went looking for software that could support the whole process. What she found did not satisfy her requirements. She describes making tools herself: Excel, visualization layers, and, in one organization, a system built on a large enterprise software platform. The last experiment was memorable for its difficulty. The useful discovery was that she kept having to construct the means to do her job.

Her professional biography describes a practitioner combining detailed analysis with visualization and narrative. That last word belongs beside the mathematics. A forecast has to become a decision that a business leader understands. Roach’s work included building workforce planning capability and centers of excellence, giving organizations both analytical tools and a way to use them.

A consultancy was the rehearsal

Roach had led strategic workforce planning at Qantas. At NBN Co she teamed up with Hare, whose experience included planning, rewards and sourcing. They founded QHR Consulting in 2014. Their shared subject was the commercial consequence of workforce choices; their eventual product would give that subject a repeatable form.

QHR let the pair test their approach across organizations. Software was part of the ambition, but consulting supplied opportunities to discover which parts of the method could be standardized and which needed room to move. A business with its own strategy, workforce and operating conditions could hardly be expected to squeeze neatly into somebody else’s model.

Initial software development began in 2018, and the organization rebranded as eQ8 following the global technology launch in 2020. It established an Austin headquarters in July 2021. The sequence is instructive: practice came before product. The tool grew out of work its founders had already been doing.

The transition had an awkward commercial wrinkle. Existing consulting clients did not immediately become software customers. Familiarity with the founders did not automatically create demand for a different way of working. The pair financed the new effort from their consulting business and had to win customers for the platform.

Roach’s LinkedIn articles helped draw inquiries from American corporations. MetLife and the United Nations became customers in March 2020. By November 2022, eQ8 had secured a Series A round. There is a pleasing detail in that passage: writing about an unfashionably technical subject helped a software business cross an ocean.

A letter to a misunderstood friend

Roach’s open letter makes sense against this background. She had worked inside companies, delivered projects from outside them, and helped create a product. Yet the meaning of her discipline still needed explaining. The complaint was about the distance between what workforce planning could contribute and what people assumed it covered.

“You need a rebrand.”

Alicia Roach, addressing strategic workforce planning

Her argument joins strategy, finance and HR. Each sees something necessary: business direction, resources, and people. Workforce planning brings those views together early enough to affect a choice. The challenge is partly analytical and partly conversational. The departments have to agree what they are planning for before the numbers can help.

That is why her writing returns to the annual budget. A budget can say what a company intends to spend over a year. The capabilities required for a longer transformation may take much longer to acquire. A short planning cycle can leave a company busy reacting to needs it could have considered earlier.

Roach also resists the idea that uncertainty excuses a narrow horizon. Her case for planning looks beyond immediate hiring freezes and restructures toward the business changes that will shape future requirements. The future does not need to be perfectly knowable for a discussion about it to be useful. A plan can contain assumptions and still help people choose.

First the work. Then the boxes.

One of her more practical arguments concerns organizational design. Before leaders rearrange reporting lines, she wants them to understand the size, skills and mix of workforce the strategy requires. Otherwise, the structure risks giving a tidy appearance to questions that remain unanswered. An org chart can be handsomely drawn and still be premature.

In her explanation, workforce planning comes first because it establishes demand. Organizational design can then arrange the workforce to support it. This is a sequencing argument, and a useful one: discover what work needs doing before deciding how the people doing it should report to one another.

The same discipline applies to skills. Roach is wary of treating the skills everybody else wants as a ready-made shopping list. External labor market information can inform a decision, but it cannot supply the company’s own strategic intention. Demand has to be understood in the context of the organization.

In a webinar discussion with Ian Bailie and Hare, she put the sequence plainly: understand the purpose and strategy, then the skills needed to enable them. That provides a reason to investigate the skills already inside the workforce and those available outside it. Without that context, an impressive inventory can remain an inventory.

There is a restraint in this approach that deserves attention. The fashionable subject may be skills, technology or a new talent tool. Roach keeps asking which problem it helps the organization solve. Her contribution is often to put the business question back in front of the machinery.

The courage to begin with imperfect numbers

At the 2025 Aon Human Capital Insights Conference in Sydney, Roach and Hare discussed future skills and workforce planning. Her emphasis was on translating strategy into specific requirements: who needs which capabilities, and when? The practical value comes from making an ambition concrete enough to examine.

She encouraged organizations to begin with their available data and improve it over time. This is a consequential piece of advice from someone whose profession depends on analysis. Waiting for complete information can postpone the very conversations the information is meant to support. A forecast can be provisional while the need to make a decision is quite real.

“giving leaders the confidence to act with what they have.”

Alicia Roach, on the purpose of workforce planning

Her account also treats planning as recurring work. Strategy changes; the workforce changes; the assumptions deserve another look. Training, retention and technology investment can then be considered as parts of a continuing response. A report becomes more useful when the organization can return to the method that produced it.

Getting the method out of the expert’s head

Accessibility has become a recurring theme in Roach’s public conversations. With Hare, she discussed democratizing workforce planning on David Green’s Digital HR Leaders podcast in October 2023. The discussion connected the availability of planning insights with the challenge of getting leaders to use them. Specialist knowledge has to travel beyond the specialist.

Her participation in practitioner discussions continues that work. She and Hare appeared together on the Strategic Workforce Planning Podcast in November 2024. A Workforce Planning Institute session paired her with Adam Gibson and Nick Kennedy to examine how plans respond to unexpected scenarios. The questions remain practical, even when the circumstances are uncertain.

eQ8’s current AI-guided offering extends the accessibility argument into the product. The company describes a guided process for building models, analyzing workforce questions and choosing next steps. Its stated design keeps people approving changes, with recommendations linked to workforce data and a planning method. These are product claims, and the intended responsibility remains with the human decision-maker.

On that product page, Roach supplies the philosophy behind the practice; Hare contributes the stakeholder conversation, and Amie contributes hands-on execution. The division reflects how much workforce planning asks of its practitioners. Somebody has to understand the model, explain the reasoning and persuade a room to act.

Roach announced the offering publicly in July 2026. It returns her career to an old question in a new form: how can the knowledge required to do this work become available to the organization that needs it? The homemade tools, the consultancy and the software all belong to that inquiry.

Her letter asked a business discipline to reconsider its name. Her working life has asked companies to reconsider where people enter their plans. The question is still specific enough to make a meeting interesting: who will do the work, with which skills, by when? Even a beautifully phrased strategy owes somebody an answer.