Achieving mission proficiencies through effective alignment of workload/manpower organizational structure
Many organizations today determine their personnel requirements as part of an ongoing disciplined requirements-determination process. But is there a process in place to ensure they occasionally reassess their personnel necessities? As a result, few DoD organizations are well positioned to proactively recognize proficiencies and address personnel growth or reduction. This often leads to pursuit of difficult and expensive assessments. Today’s leaders are expected to meet ambitious stakeholder performance objectives, take on new missions, or even transform their organization to meet changing missions as well as political, economic, budgetary and policy demands. Often, decision-makers are forced to use “best judgment” which all too often leads to undefended outcomes and performance gloom. The resulting deep cuts in personnel, along with little to no change in mission, leave organizations in chaos as they seek to balance the daily work and mission requirements with the remaining personnel. We have repeatedly found organizations need unified data, standard processes, internal buy-in, and defendable models to properly define and allocate resources against challenging demands.
SoundWay’s comprehensive approach addresses all work performed by all sources of labor and provides tools to define the optimum mix of manpower for the organization. This includes describing alternate sources of labor which may make delivery of services more efficient or less expensive. Our analysis incorporates factors to aid in avoiding the use of overtime, temporary or part time workers, seasonal employees, borrowed labor, contract, etc. We also evaluate the inherently governmental work and requirements to oversee contracts (e.g., Contracting Officer Technical Representative) as part of our assessment. Our final reports provide documentation that will assist in:
- Affirming total demand for labor, to include recommended staffing offsets.
- Configuring the organization around appropriate organizing principles such as customers served, expertise required, and programs managed.
- Defining manpower requirements as objective, appropriately graded military or civilian.
- Minimizing overhead, reducing duplication, and establishing adequate supervisory ratios.
Benefits to the Customer
- Strategic Alignment
- Defending requirements defined to perform current and future mission.
- Work aligned to mission priorities to focus on what is important.
- Prioritize resources to maximize performance.
- Improved Performance.
- Identifying bottlenecks and barricades to efficiency.
- Focus resources on maximizing mission objectives.
- Define requirements to achieve mission success.
- Improved study process.
- Advancing technologies to reduce time and costs.
- Reduce burden on personnel.
- Improve data quality and accelerate delivery and/or results.
- Defining the Organization.
- Define tasks directly to requirements.
- Identify and define risk of insufficient resources.
Our Team
The SoundWay team is made up of project managers and analysts who are highly experienced in strategic planning, workforce analysis and organizational change. The team brings a broad background from across DoD Services and organizations, encompassing direct experience in addressing operations, planning, logistics, and resource planning. Using this experience, our team of seasoned former-military and government professionals have repeatedly demonstrated the ability to deliver better, faster, and less expensive assessments. We bring the process, toolset, and experience needed to reduce the agony and provide confident results.
Our Approach
SoundWay has developed a mature and unified approach to achieving more effective organizations we call Workload/Manpower Analytics. This is a set of processes supported by a sophisticated toolset that our team applies to define and align an organization’s requirements. Our approach is based on a streamlined five-phase process that leverages best of breed capabilities from accepted and normalized manpower analysis methodologies such as Army Regulations, 570-5. Many organizational effectiveness analysis approaches typically rely on discrete, independent models which tend to focus on individual elements of manpower and staffing such as recruiting, occupation assignments, promotions, retention, budgets, requirements estimation, unit assignments and many others. Our approach brings together a suite of automated tools, processes, and culture, to align resource contribution, tasking, mission priority and necessity of service required to support sustainment and operational readiness. This approach provides a flexible, scalable model that applies a common framework and method to analyze requirements for a single organization, or to develop standards applicable across a range of similar organizations or a portfolio of capabilities, thereby enabling comparison using a consistent, repeatable model. A core element of our ability to provide speedy and confident results is our automated tools. These structured models based on validated data supports detailed assessment analysis (e.g., regression analysis, workload, mission alignment and quality). In the past, each assessment essentially started fresh. Our team works with organizations to apply the tools and technology to support in rapidly accessing and visualizing interdependent information to make impartial assessments and move beyond perception into well-structured, defensible strategies.
The SoundWay team can configure our process toolset to produce a variety of organizational dashboards for additional visualization, exploration, and analysis. These dashboards provide the organization ongoing analysis to see a tailored view of its information, while retaining the capability to support efforts at similar organizations. Our dashboards have a range of standard features to explore the work and the workforce data, plus tailorable views to explore identified issues or anomalies, and predictive analytics to explore “what-if” scenarios.
To find out more, visit www.soundwayconsulting.com or contact us at 571-210-0624.
