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Introduction

One of the first things that companies normally do in a "reorganization" is to lay off personnel. It is now recognized that here are better ways for businesses to cut costs besides cutting jobs. In fact, eliminating personnel is just a quick and temporary solution that may end up backfiring on the company. Managing
human capital is central to maximizing staff on major projects during a down
period. More effective and long term solutions comes from implementing more efficient work processes through technology upgrades and cross training of personnel.  

Reorganization

The immediately task of restructuring of any organization is to develop an innovative, efficient and lest cost financial and management structure which will be able to address the short-run problems of budget deficit and at the same time will be consistent with modern financial management practices. The restructuring will ensure transparency of actions and resource use and introduce accountability at all levels. This task will be address through Information Systems.  

Each division, department, unit and individual will be evaluated by an internal/external audit to determine their proper place in the BNGO. To maximize the efficiency of each unit all necessary changes and reorganization will be carried out within the shortest possible time.  This means that complicated policies will be simplified, duplication will be eliminated, paper work will be minimized, and procedures will be modernized to reduce processing time and use of other resources.

Pools of skilled workers will be created. In addition to research units having their own “staff”, highly skilled workers drawn from the pools will provide services. By having fewer persons specializing in one specific technical area, the BNGO can better target training and develop the skills of those employees in the pool and thus provide better support to the researchers.

The overall structure of the BNGO must be organized in such a way so that a certain course of action does not increase the benefits to a particular unit at the expense of the BNGO as a whole. Teamwork and unity will be emphasized, institutionally supported and encouraged.  The BNGO management must ensure that all parts of the BNGO are in balance with one another. This means that each Division, each Department, and each project will have just the real amount of resources to do the job.  In order to accomplish  this balance, management needs information about each of the parts.  

Concept Paper Pooling of Staff

As per instructions of Director, BNGO needs to create a Skill Bank/Job Pool from amongst the existing staff to be reoriented/trained (if necessary), for possible future reassignment and relocation to areas other than the ones that they are currently working in.  The issue is how to do this practically.

This is necessitated by the fact that BNGO can not normally recruit any further staff from outside due to the “freeze” in force, on recruitment of new staff in both the restricted and the unrestricted areas. As such from now onward all out efforts are to be made in meeting the staffing requirements of the BNGO from resources available in-house.

Under the circumstances, the Division Directors are requested to put forward the names of those staff (in consultation with the PIs and the supervisors working under them) whose services they consider, could be better utilized in some other areas of the BNGO, without of course, hampering their own programs.

Identifying surplus workers is not difficult; trying to find out what to do with them is difficult.

As an example: you find in a unit 5 people out of 10 that are not needed.

What do you do with these 5 persons?

1.    Do you leave them in the office doing the same jobs that they were doing and transfer them to a new job when it is found?

2.      Do you leave them in the office but not doing anything until they are called to be transfer to another project?

3.      Do you send them home where they wait to be called?

4.      Do you place them all in a room at the BNGO to wait to be called?

5.      Do you send them to classes to be taught new skills and then send them home to wait, etc?

(1) In this situation there are again two scenarios: you either tell them that they are to be transfer or you do not.

• If you do not tell them they are going to be transfer until it is done, how will the individual be “interviewed” for his new job?

• The manager of the unit that is recruiting will not want to take an individual unless he has interviewed him.

• Will a manager of the recruiting unit want a person who has been declared as surplus by another unit? The manager will know that this person is not the most productive.

• If you do tell the person that he is going to be transfer, how is that person going to act and work knowing that everyone else in the unit knows that he is being considered for a transfer.

• How will he work and what will he do if it has already been decided that there is not enough work to do for him?

• The transferring unit manager will also want this person gone as soon as possible in order to reduce his budget. 

(2) This is the same situation as about except worse. These people will be sitting in the office doing nothing while the other workers are trying to work.

(3) This is better in the sense that you have them out of the office and somewhere else waiting to be transfer. They are not hanging around and doing nothing. However, the other problems still exist.

(4) This is the same as #3 except they are at the BNGO instead of being home.

(5) It is the Director’s philosophy that all surplus persons should be educated and retrained for more productive work either by being rotated in the BNGO or is placed in productive jobs outside the BNGO.

Problem: Where to get the money, personnel, and facilities to education and re-train these people. Even assuming the money and personnel is available, what do you train these people to do?

It was the Directors intentions to identify these people, identify their needs, and then go to the donors to provide the money and/or help in placing these people in other jobs.

Conceptual Plan:

1. Identify the areas of skills that are needed based on priorities and workforce projections at BNGO such as:

2. • Computer data entry

   • Health Care Worker

   • Interviewer

   • Secretarial

   • Etc.

3. From this list of skills (approximately 6 in number) develop an education program for each of the particular skill. Within each skill have three levels of training.

4. Identify the surplus personnel without informing anyone of the ones that are being chosen.

5. Knowing the surplus personnel and the education needed a cost can be calculated.

6. Present this to the donors for funding.

7. Upon receipt on funding, organize the training programs.

8. Notify the employee of his re-training and the schedule of classes he is to attend.

9. Organize a unit to help with the placement of the employee either inside the BNGO or outside the BNGO with other organizations.

10. Send the employee home to wait for placement. His salary will continue for …months and then ……….………

Problems:

• If no funding can be obtained from the donors, there is no way to retrain the employees.

• This will take at least six months or more to implement depending on funding.

Since for those requiring to recruit new staff, the creation of the Pool has become a priority as there are already a number of requests for recruitment pending with Personnel, it is requested that this issue should be addressed within the shortest possible time frame.

Background

The original idea of pooling was suggest for the computer programmers at BNGO. In the past computer programming for input screens and statistical analysis was a long and tedious process and a full time programmer was needed. Today these same input screens can be designed within minutes, and statistical packages such as SPSS integrates directly with the input data. A PI can easily learn to do this himself within a half day. There is no need for a full time programmer. At most, a programmer may be needed for a few hours at the start of a project. If the programmer has knowledge of statistical methods then he may also be needed at the end of the project.

The BNGO has over 40-50 of these people listed. Most of these people have been observed to be spending most of their time playing games on the computer. In one case the computer programmer was found asleep in the library. It is estimated that only approximately 10 are needed for the BNGO.

The pooling idea came about in order to place all these surplus people under the direction of CIS where their skills could be upgraded, and their services could then be offered to the PI and to the BNGO at a much higher level. In this one case, there was a very clear plan of education, subjects to be taught, direction and tasks to be performed. A certain amount of resources are available since there are staff in the BNGO that can teach these classes.

Other Suggestions

The physical maintenance of office facilities is next to labor in the high cost of doing business and to this end, it may be possible to bring about the transitioning of the physical work environment into a virtual one 

Making activities become more efficiency include measuring business costs by examining the total cost of ownership (TCO). TCO includes the total cost of operating a "business process." 

All of these suggestions make use of a good management information system.

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