The Royal Navy requires a well trained and highly motivated workforce to perform specialised and demanding tasks efficiently and effectively. Its continued success depends on sound financial provision and a supply of suitable personnel willing to serve. There are severe penalties from over or under estimating the number and cost of the people needed, so achieving the right balance is a matter of risk management. Study of the Royal Navy's history shows the problem of controlling the number of and expenditure on its personnel is not new, but the decision by the author in April 1997 to capture the location and payment made to each Naval Service person every month has enabled more light to be thrown on this complex issue. As a result of this work, a reliable, coherent and comprehensive data library was built and is still being maintained. New techniques were devised to track the movements and payments made to individual Naval Service people as they pass through the manning system. This dataset was used to establish the future cost and deployment patterns for Naval personnel in order to protect the Service by ensuring sufficient funds would be available to pay its planned strength. To achieve this, detailed forecasts were constructed so all the available trained strength was distributed to the individual budgets based on their historical allocation. This approach allowed visibility of the movement of manpower and its cost as the system responded to fluctuations in demand. Budget managers actively sought this information as it exposed sudden changes in manning levels and costs caused by action elsewhere. To meet this need, each budgetary area is now provided with its own individual planned demand for Naval manpower, its forecast of strength and its cost for the next four years. In this increasingly difficult financial situation, the political and economic signs indicate that the need for this type of work will grow as Service planners will be called upon to show their equipment programmes and personnel plans are affordable. As future governments struggle to meet demands for funding, the Service will have to demonstrate the cost effectiveness of any new manning initiative which, for it to be successful, will have to be supported by empirical evidence and offer an analytical framework that will demonstrate its value both before and after implementation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:555150 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Rennison, Willaim Ross |
| Publisher | University of Portsmouth |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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