D915 is Resource Management and Performance, listed at WGU as MHA 6916 and worth three competency units. It covers managing human and physical resources at both department and organization level. In practice that means two kinds of writing: staffing arithmetic, where you match people to demand and prove the match with numbers, and asset reasoning, where you decide what to do with space, equipment and supply. Both are then tied to performance, meaning the measures that show whether the resource is being used well. Papers that stay qualitative in this course get returned, because the aspects are asking for figures.
Staff to demand, not to headcount
The instinct in most student submissions is to reason from the current team. We have six coders, the backlog is growing, so we need a seventh. That is a request, not an analysis. The analysis runs the other way: how much work arrives, how much one person completes in an hour, how many productive hours a person actually delivers, and therefore how many people the volume requires.
Two ideas do most of the work. The first is productive time. A full time position does not deliver a full year of work once vacation, sick time, training, meetings and turnover are taken out, so any staffing calculation that treats a position as fully available will understate what is needed. State the assumption you use and where it came from. The second is variability. Demand in healthcare arrives unevenly by hour, day and season, and a plan built on an average will be short every busy Monday. Say how you handle peaks: flexible hours, a float pool, cross training, overtime with a stated cost, or accepting a longer queue at peak with a stated impact.
Physical resources follow the same logic with different units. Space and equipment questions are utilization questions: how many hours the resource is available, how many it is used, what the turnaround between uses costs, and what happens to throughput if the utilization target moves. An imaging suite running at very high utilization has no room for an urgent add on, and saying that is a more sophisticated answer than reporting the utilization rate alone.
Working the aspects when the answer is arithmetic
Aspect detail sits in your Course of Study. In this course a portion of the aspects usually want a calculation and the rest want the reasoning around it, so identify which is which before drafting. Calculation aspects are cheap in words and expensive in care. Reasoning aspects are the opposite.
The word budget, worked. Assume a 2,000 word deliverable with nine scored aspects, exhibits excluded. Take 120 for a scope paragraph naming the department, its volume and its current staffing, leaving 1,880, or about 209 per aspect flat. Calculation backed aspects need only 130 words of prose each because the table carries the detail. If three aspects are calculation backed, that releases around 240 words. Move them to the aspects that ask about implications, trade offs and performance measurement, taking those to roughly 290 each. Then check one thing before drafting: every calculation aspect needs a sentence stating the assumption behind its inputs, and that sentence is inside the 130 words, not extra.
Do the arithmetic in a spreadsheet before writing, and keep every assumption on the same sheet. Assumptions discovered mid draft tend to change earlier numbers, and a document whose totals do not reconcile is the clearest possible signal to an evaluator.
A resource plan an operations director would read
Where directions supply a template, follow it. Where they do not, this arrangement carries the material most rubrics in this subject ask for, and it puts the assumptions where they can be checked.
| Section | What it must contain | The assumption it depends on |
|---|---|---|
| Demand profile | Volume by period, with the peaks visible | Whether the period sampled is representative |
| Work standard | Units completed per hour per person, with a source | That the standard fits your case mix and systems |
| Available hours | Productive hours per position after leave and training | The leave and turnover rate you applied |
| Required staffing | Positions needed, computed and shown | Whether the work can be divided as the number implies |
| Skill mix | Which tasks need which credential or experience level | Scope of practice and internal policy limits |
| Physical resources | Space, equipment, licences and supply required | Current utilization and available capacity |
| Cost | Salary, benefits load, overtime exposure, equipment lifecycle | The benefit rate and the wage figures used |
| Performance measures | Productivity, turnaround, quality and one staff measure | That the measures can be collected without new systems |
The right hand column is the one that turns a plan into a professional document. Every operational number rests on an assumption, and stating them makes your analysis checkable rather than confident.
Evidence craft when the resource is people
Workforce writing has both a numeric discipline and a human one, and rubrics in this subject usually score both.
- Source your work standards. Professional associations, published benchmarking and vendor neutral operational studies all publish productivity ranges, and using a range with a stated midpoint is more honest than a single borrowed figure.
- Include the benefit load in labor cost. Salary alone understates the cost of a position substantially, and a plan costed on salary will be wrong by a large margin.
- Distinguish productivity from performance. Units per hour measures output. Performance also includes accuracy, timeliness and whether the work created rework somewhere else.
- Say what the plan does to the people in it. Added hours, changed shifts and increased targets have retention consequences, and turnover is expensive enough to belong in the arithmetic.
- Respect the legal edges. Scheduling, classification, overtime rules and accommodation are regulated, and a plan should note where human resources involvement is required.
- Cite in APA at the claim, including benchmark sources and any wage data.
The most convincing sentence in a resource paper names the constraint you could not solve. Space that cannot expand, a credential that takes months to recruit, a system that limits throughput regardless of staffing. Naming it and planning around it reads as operational experience.
What separates Competent from a submission sent back
Returns here cluster in three places. The staffing number with no visible calculation, which cannot be scored for accuracy. The plan with no assumption statement, so a reader cannot tell whether the answer is right or merely confident. And the performance section that lists measures without saying who collects them, how often, or what threshold triggers action.
Submissions that pass on the first read show their work. Demand described with real periods including peaks. A work standard with a source. Productive hours computed rather than assumed. A staffing figure that can be recomputed from the inputs given. Costs including benefit load. And measures with an owner and a cadence attached.
Performance assessment work at WGU can be revised and resubmitted with no grade penalty, so a return is a scheduling cost inside your six month flat rate term rather than a scoring one. In this course the rebuild is usually arithmetic, which is quick if your spreadsheet is clean and slow if the numbers only ever existed inside sentences.
Where this course sits beside a proctored objective assessment in your plan, our involvement is preparation only. We work practice calculations, drill vocabulary and give an honest readiness call. We never sit or assist during a proctored assessment and never ask for portal credentials.
Six mistakes that cost time in D915
- Staffing from headcount. Start from workload and work standards, not from the team you happen to have.
- Treating a position as fully available. Leave, training and turnover reduce productive hours, often by more than a tenth.
- Planning to the average. Demand arrives in peaks. Say how the peaks are covered and what it costs.
- Salary as the cost of labor. Add the benefit load, overtime exposure and the cost of turnover.
- Utilization without a target. A rate is only meaningful against the level you are aiming for, and near total utilization removes all flexibility.
- Measures with no owner. Performance sections score on cadence and accountability, not on the list of possible metrics.
How we work this course with you
Send the task directions, your rubric and any volume figures the task supplies, and you get a staffing model built with the inputs visible, an assumption list you can defend line by line, a resource plan skeleton matched to your scored aspects with word counts, and a review that recomputes your numbers to make sure the document reconciles with itself before an evaluator does it for you.
Questions D915 students ask
Where do I get productivity standards if I do not work in the department?
How detailed should the cost section be?
Do I need to address staff wellbeing or is that outside the course?
Building the D915 staffing model?
Send the MHA 6916 directions and any volumes. You get a computed model and an assumption list back.
Where D915 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 1 current WGU program. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.