Human resources in defence materiel acquisitions – analyses of personnel in staffing plans

The Norwegian Defence Materiel Agency (NDMA) is responsible for efficiently procuring, managing and disposing equipment for the Norwegian defence sector, and investment projects play a central role in the procurement of materiel. Investments in materiel will be essential to strengthen the defence of Norway in the years to come. NDMA depends crucially on access to human resources to facilitate the successful and efficient execution of investment projects. This, in turn, requires long-term planning and management of human resources, both in NDMA and the other agencies in the Norwegian defence sector. The investment project documentation includes staffing plans estimating the demand for human resources during the procurement and termination phases of the projects. So far, those plans have been assembled and aggregated only to a limited extent. This report documents the work of the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) in collecting and stucturing the staffing plan data of 155 investment projects and presents descriptive analyses of the registered demand for human resources in these projects. Furthermore, the report evaluates the possibility for predicting future staffing demand in projects and performs initial analyses of the gap between registered and actual demand on an aggregated level. In doing so, the report seeks to strengthen the understanding – and identify areas for further studies – of human resources in projects investing in defence materiel. Even though the staffing demand per year is relatively low in most investment projects, some projects estimate almost as much as 40 full-time equivalents (FTEs) per year during the procurement and termination phases of the projects. In general, staff from the NDMA constitutes the majority of the FTEs in projects, although most projects also rely on support from the Armed Forces and others such as FFI or external consultants. The staffing demand displays tendencies to increase with the economic size of the project and the staffing period, and it also varies with the NDMA department being responsible for the project. Because we are studying the registered demand for human resources – rather than actual use of human resources in a given project – it is difficult to conclude whether variations occur due to real differences in the staffing demand or other factors, such as differences in methods employed to estimate the demand. We also find indications of gaps between registered demand for and actual use of human resources in 2018, on an aggregate level. In particular, it appears to be difficult to estimate the true demand for materiel management personnel in the projects. Gaps between registered and true demand can result in several negative consequences, including delays in the project and less resources to perform important management tasks for materiel in operation. Thus, we recommend that the projects utilise previous experiences and estimates from comparable projects in the planning phase to compute the staffing demand, in addition to NDMA allocating human resources to projects based on the staffing plans in the project documentation to a larger extent than today.