Developing Strategic Plans for Defense Human Resource Management: Case Study of Planning in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness

Abstract

Strategic planning plays an integral role inguiding the work of many public and private sector organizations, including the U.S.Department of Defense (DoD). Indeed, workdone at and on behalf of DoD since the 1960s haslaid the foundation for modern strategic planningpractices in organizations of all types (DonVito, 1969;Petruschell, 1968; Bracken, 1990). In public sectororganizations, strategic planning can serve the goals ofthe organizations leaders and the goals of higher-levelelected and appointed officials who are responsiblefor guiding and directing the organization. Althoughleaders of many organizations appreciate the benefitsthat strategic planning can offer, they wrestle with theprinciples they should use to guide a planning processand the methods they should apply to document andimplement the resulting strategic plans.We undertook a project lasting about six monthsthat aimed to help leaders of public sector organizations of all kindsand particularly those chargedwith the management of defense human resourcesto identify and apply sound principles for their strategic planning. In this project, we first identified a setof principles relevant to public sector organizations engaged in strategic planning. We then applied andrefined these principles for defense human resourcemanagement and (1) arrived at a final list of principles to guide public sector organizations strategicplanning (see Figure 1) and (2) assessed the contentof the organizations strategic plans. Specifically, wereviewed the content of the five strategic plans developed by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defensefor Personnel and Readiness (OUSD P and R) between2001 and 2020 (summarized in Table 1) in relation tothe principles we identified.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2022
Accession Number
AD1156851

Entities

People

  • Charles A. Goldman
  • John D. Winkler
  • Nathan Thompson

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Business Administration
  • Department Of Defense
  • Education
  • Governments
  • Human Resources
  • Management Personnel
  • Military Education
  • Military Science
  • National Security
  • Organizational Structure
  • Personnel Management
  • Public Administration
  • Resource Management
  • Space Force
  • Unified Combatant Commands
  • United States

Fields of Study

  • Business

Readers

  • Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.
  • Defense Acquisition Program Management
  • Organizational Process Management (OPM).