What is Manpower / Human Resources Planning (HRP)?
Manpower planning or HR planning are synonymous. HR planning is more broad-based.
Hereinafter, we will call it Human Resource Planning or HRP in short.
Human resource planning is the process of anticipating and carrying out the movement of
people into, within, and out of the organization. Human resources planning is done to
achieve the optimum use of human resources and to have the correct number and types of
employees needed to meet organizational goals.
We also can say that, Human resource planning is the process of systematically reviewing
human resource requirements to ensure that the required numbers of employees with the
required skills are available when and where they are needed.
Human resource planning includes four factors:
Quantity : How many employees do we need?
Quality : Which skills, knowledge and abilities do we need?
Space : Where do we need the employees?
Time : When do we need the employees? How long do we need them?
Definition of Human Resources Planning (HRP)
HRP can be defined as the task of assessing and anticipating the skill, knowledge and labor
time requirements of the organization, and initiating action to fulfill or source those
requirements. Thus, if the organization as a whole or one of its subsystem is not
performing to the benchmark, in other words, it is declining, it may need to plan a
reduction or redeploys its existing labor force. On the other hand, if it is growing or
diversifying, it might need to find and tap into a source of suitably skilled labor.
Lets look into some definitions of HRP as given by different experts.
Coleman has defined HR/MP planning as The Process of determining manpower
requirements and the means for meeting those requirements in order to carry out the
integrated plan of the organization.
Stainer defines manpower planning as Strategy for acquisition, utilization, improvement
and preservation of an enterprises human resources.
Vetter opines that it is the process by which management determines how the organization
should move from its manpower position to its desired manpower position to carry out
integrated plan of the organization.
According to Geisler, Manpower planning is the process including forecasting, developing
and controlling by which a firm ensures that it has-
* The right number of people,
* The right kind of people,
* At the right places,
* At the right time, doing work for which they are economically most useful.
Wickstrom very beautifully summarizes the features of HRP,
Forecasting future manpower requirements, where we use mathematical projections, to
