Introduction
Since the 1980s an unprecedented rate of change facing both public and private
organisations has produced a major reorientation of structures, systems and
management methods. Human resource planning has not been exempt from
this and the methods established in the 1970s and 1980s have increasingly been
criticised as being prescriptive, over centralised and lacking a flexibility in
planning for people under turbulent conditions. What then is the revised role
for human resource planning when the skills of people are even more
paramount in institutional success, lead times for internal skills development
remain lengthy and the labour market is still not as responsive as it should be in
terms of available competencies? This new role must also fit the situation in
which formalised planning groups and structures as currently operated may be
incompatible with the devolvement of planning and the empowerment of line
managers in people matters.
This paper intends to overview the development of the human resource
planning discipline and to suggest a reorientation of its conceptual basis to
meet current institutional demands, particularly in the public sector. In doing
this it provides new emphasis and scope to the notion that planning is about
institutional learning and that the prime beneficiaries of this learning should be
the managers themselves (Geus, 1988). To release this potential a systems
approach is adopted that takes human resource planning well beyond the
organising scope that the original founders of the discipline had envisaged, but
it is to them that we must turn in order to provide the building blocks for the
new concept.