Manpower & Reserve affairs: Investing in people by reshaping the organization

Army, Oct 2002 by Brown, Reginald J

As I complete my first year as the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, I would first like to acknowledge my heartfelt condolences to the relatives and friends of those who died at the Pentagon on that tragic day of September 11. Of the total that perished that day, 75 were from the Army family; one third of them were part of our Army human resource community. They are missed and not forgotten.

In their memory, I know that our people can and will continue to deliver the excellent service that drives our success as a nation and as an Army. Immediately following that tragic day, Army headquarters was at full operation in temporary offices with a renewed sense of dedication inspired by our losses. Our people-soldiers, civilians, retirees, veterans and families-continue to be the engine that drives our progress, the centerpiece of our formation. We continue to attract, train, motivate and retain the numbers and quality we need to ensure our ability to be persuasive in peace and invincible in war. To continue to meet this challenge, we must invest in our people and provide them with the tools they need.

Our focus during this past year included streamlining the human resource (HR) organization at Army headquarters, continuing improvements in delivering civilian personnel management services, and effecting the rapid mobilization response of our reserve components. The focus of the major initiatives to be accomplished over the coming year include: developing the right workforce mix of military, civilians and contractors to efficiently meet manpower requirements; accurately capturing the total workforce cost; and obtaining better visibility of the efforts of all our contract services.

Last year's article emphasized that investing in our people was one of the Army's primary goals. A key ingredient to accomplishing that goal is the development of a capable, supportable organization with the right tools and the right focus to accomplish the mission. To this end, the Secretary of the Army has restructured the Army Secretariat and the Army Staff into a more integrated headquarters that streamlines the flow of information and speeds decision making. We are evolving into an organization that welcomes innovation and embraces state-of-the-art business practices. Secretary White's vision is "to become a lean, integrated, streamlined headquarters with an agile, responsive, and adaptive staff and organizational structure that reduces layers of review and applies sound business practices to our Army challenges."

In meeting this challenge, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Manpower and Reserve Affairs has shed its operational functions and aligned its human resource functions with the deputy chief of staff, G-1. The next phase of realignment will focus on transforming our field operating agencies and major commands. These initiatives should allow us to meet the congressionally mandated 15 percent reduction in headquarters staffs and enable us to either save or reinvest manpower into our priority missions.

Second, our investments in the civilian personnel community have made 2002 a landmark year for several reasons. We fielded a comprehensive new civilian personnel management automation system, streamlined our regional management organizations and improved productivity. We were the first service within the Department of Defense to deploy the modern defense civilian personnel data system, greatly enhancing our productivity. We streamlined civilian personnel management overhead functions and significantly improved customer service by closing two of seven continental U.S. civilian personnel operations centers (CPOCs)-the Army National Capital Region and the Southeast Region-and realigning the servicing boundaries of the remaining CPOCs. Continuing to leverage technology and mirroring best business practices, we reached full operational capability at the Army Benefits Center-Civilian, collocated with the North Central Region CPOC at Fort Riley, Kan. By integrating these specialized resources in a single employee-directed benefits services center, we were able to eliminate benefit counselors at Army installations and offer consistent expertise to the entire Army civilian workforce.

Rapid response to the Army's expanding missions continues to be our prime goal, and our goal of filling civilian jobs faster is consistently measured through productivity assessments. We are filling approximately 65,000 civilian positions annually while using fewer personnel to do so. The average time required to fill a job is down dramatically-from 87 days in April 1998 to 58 days in April 2002. We continue to focus on reducing the time to fill jobs as well as to manage and develop the civilian Objective Force strategically.

We have fielded powerful automation tools to give managers and employees immediate access to information. These tools automate manual processes and substantially streamline our business. However, the tools' greatest value will be to support our evolving regionalized environments, including the transformation installation management (TIM) environment. The civilian personnel function will retain a regional configuration. This configuration meets the Secretary's intent to remove unnecessary layers and redundancies, streamline decision making, realign fragmented organizations, clearly define responsibilities and authorities and incorporate best business practices. It will provide an opportunity to build an improved delivery system for civilian personnel services. This concept will enable the Army to manage resources more effectively and ensure that Department of Defense and congressional directives are met.