"In today's competitive business environment, managers and companies find themselves facing competition for scarce resources, narrowing windows of opportunity, and constantly changing demands of internal and external customers. In addition, projects are continually being added, changed, and removed in response to business activity and changing market conditions."
The human resource process is the most important resource that most program managers do not even think about. The myth of hiring to fix the issue of human allocation is not the answer. The RAMJET program that I am presently involved in has actually just had this problem. For the last two years we have been dealing with the same team from Contractor A. One of the members left for a different company and another was relocated to another project. The members of the team that were lost were the real link between the avionics shop that was testing the RAMJET and the Contractor avionics engineers.
The solution to their relocation was to allow others that were not involved with the project to assist. We did not have the camaraderie that we had developed with the previous group of workers, hence, the productivity fell off somewhat. The relationship, trust and knowledge of each others weaknesses and strengths were gone. Other tangible costs that were eventually realized were:
1. Cost of administering resignation-letters and documentations
2. Recruitment cost for replacement-adverts placed in periodicals
3. Cost of Selection and the time it would consume from staffers
4. Cost of getting a relief officer as a stop-gap
5. Cost of administering the recruitment and selection process
6. Cost of Induction training for new employees
7. Cost of employment itself-higher salary or other perks
8. Cost of litigation depending on mode of departure of employee.
Not all of these factors surfaced because they were all from the...