Portsmouth Business School

Thesis summary

The Royal Navy requires a well trained and highly motivated workforce to perform specialised and demanding tasks efficiently and effectively. Its continued success depends on sound financial provision and a supply of suitable personnel willing to serve. There are severe penalties from over or under estimating the number and cost of the people needed as this represents a third of the total defence budget. Naval personnel are expensive, so the need to gain a sound understanding of their true cost and the interaction with the Royal Navy’s complex manning process is central to the Service’s future wellbeing.

The number of people leaving the Services has fallen rapidly as rising civilian unemployment has made the option of seeking work in the private sector less appealing. The challenge of managing workforce reductions is not new, but prior to this work, those evaluating a savings measure to reduce personnel costs would have had only a limited amount of historical data available and so been denied any visibility of pan-Navy deployment patterns. Without a process being in place for forecasting and then tracking workforce movement, no allowance could be made for the additional costs falling to other budgets employing the personnel who had been displaced.

That early costing methods were flawed only came to light during the Royal Navy’s last redundancy round in the 1990s. Service personnel are mobile and tend not to leave the Service when appointments draw to a close, but migrate through the manning system to new positions. This means the savings being declared using these early methods would be unduly high, as they relate to the budget in question and did not include the cost increases incurred elsewhere.

As the basis of his research, the author recorded the location and monthly payment made to each Naval Service person. This process of data capture, which the author began in April 1997 and which is ongoing, has enabled more light to be thrown on the complex issue of funding Naval Service personnel and so has greatly reduced the level of management risk associated with providing the resources needed for the Navy’s workforce. As a result of this research, a reliable, coherent and comprehensive data library, which is still being maintained, was designed and then built. New techniques and models were devised to track the movements and compute the cost of Naval Service people as they pass through the manning system. These methods of data manipulation have been adopted by the Naval Service and the approach extended to include the Maritime Reserve Forces.