Manpower planning for government institutions

Manpower Planning is an aspect of Human Resources Management, mainly based on mathematical modelisation. Manpower planning offers support to the human resources management by studying the impact of different alternative strategies.
On international level, already there have been carried out fundamental research concerning the mathematical human resource management. We refer to the research carried out by D. Bartholomew, A. Forbes and S. McClean (Statistical techniques for manpower planning, 2nd edition, Wiley, Chichester).
The Center for Manpower Planning and Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel carries out research on mathematical personnel management as one of few in Belgium. This Center was already involved in research on manpower planning in all its aspects, as there is fundamental research (see list of publications), practical experience as well as interdisciplinary research.
This investigation aims to fit existing theories and models on the specificity of government institutes, based on the present expertise. In this way, an analysis of the existing personnel structure in the government institutes will allow to formulate proposals on alternative scenarios concerning the personnel management, represented on a well-founded way.
First of all, one has to make an inventory of possible bottlenecks and aspects where the human resource management has to pay attention to. First of all, it is necessary that the existing personnel situation is analysed in the field of among others the promotion and wastage of the personnel.
Successively an assessment of the consequences of certain measures about recruitment, wastage, transfers, mutations and promotions will be made.
Quantitative analyses based on manpower models are able to assess the impact of a given promotion and/or recruitment policy. In this way the comparison of the output of different management scenarios can support a decision about a particular personnel management.
This analysis therefore results in the proposal of a limited number of options regarding the personnel management that result in a better situation where discrepancies between the available and desired personnel distributions over the different categories are minimised. This results in a more optimal use of the available personnel and in propositions on recruitment, promotion and wastage strategies.
The measures that can be studies are e.g. additional recruitment, temporary labour, retrenchment in staff, reduction in working hours, part-time work as well as transfers between different services and farming out.
The consequences that can be studied are e.g. a bad personnel distribution (wrong ratio between the different hierarchical levels), an over-aged personnel, massive dismissals, bad flow, too expensive public servants, shortage or surplus of personnel.