Improvements Needed in Army's Determination of Manpower Requirements for Support and Administrative Functions

Army manpower survey teams make on-site appraisals and recommend the number of people needed for support and administrative functions at Army installations. The recommendations of the survey team are also the basis for the garrison staffing guide, which provides criteria for subsequent surveys. The surveys, although useful for some installation and major command management decisions, are not coordinated with the major manpower activities of planning, programming, and budgeting; allocating human resources to installations and work centers; and evaluating manpower use. Consequently, the Army supports its garrison budget by adjusting prior year budgets. However, the Army cannot quantify the effect of not receiving the personnel which survey teams say are needed for garrison work and cannot accurately predict manpower needs.

In order to improve its justifications for budget requests, the Army needs to overcome various problems. The Army's manpower survey program is not designed to provide input to the budget. Since the survey teams determine garrison needs by organizational element and the Army budgets by activity, the survey team recommendations cannot be summarized into the activity used for budgeting. Survey team recommendations have exceeded congressional authorizations; in fiscal year (FY) 1978 the shortage was 20 percent. Survey teams and work measurement staff make recommendations without regard to the source of labor, even though garrison labor is funded by four appropriations and can be managed under about nine different programs. Installation commanders have been given a great deal of flexibility in distributing available resources, organizing activities, and using other labor sources, but this decentralized management contributes to a number of problems. Commands have been directed to develop work measurement standards for total programs or missions, but the Army headquarters has not provided the top level management direction on selecting the appropriate technique, how to relate work center requirements to program changes in the budget, how to develop standards to compare similar activities, the extent methods studies should be conducted to improve and standardize operations before setting standards, and collecting reliable labor and work load data.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

Director: Martin M. Ferber Team: General Accounting Office: Federal Personnel and Compensation Division Phone: (202) 275-5140