Human resource (HR) planning should answer to the important questions regarding how much staff is necessary for our state administration and in which positions. However, in the first year of implementation of the Public Administration Reform Strategy, the Government failed to provide these answers.
Half a year after the Government adopted a decision to urgently adopt the HR Plan for 2017, this document was not prepared.
That is how both the Government and the general public remained without answers to the questions:
- how many people are currently working in state administration bodies and in the General Secretariat of the Government;
- how many jobs and positions are systematized, that is, prescribed by the rulebooks on internal organization and systematization of state administration bodies and the General Secretariat of the Government;
- how many people and in which positions should be recruited this year.
HR planning is the instrument that should recognize future needs in performing jobs at certain positions and comprehensively analyze available resources and human resources in regard to those needs.
In the context of the accession to the European Union, this instrument is particularly important because it should enable relation with the fulfilment of the Montenegro’s Accession Program to the European Union, ie, with projections of the necessary personnel that should implement demanding obligations in the negotiations process.
Additionally, the adoption of the HR plan is an explicit obligation prescribed by the Law on Civil Servants and State Employees.
However, the Information adopted by the Government in February states that the Human Resources Management Authority is not in a position to prepare a plan, inter alia, because certain ministries (Ministry of European affairs, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Foreign affairs, Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism, Ministry of Economy, Ministry of Transport and Maritime Affairs) failed to adopt the rulebooks on systematization or have failed to align them with the new Decree on the organization and manner of work of the state administration.
The Government has concluded that the plan should be urgently prepared by the end of March, but this has not been done to date.
The Government’s HR plan for 2016 was adopted with a significant delay, in June last year. By adopting it with delay, the document has been left with no possibility of influencing budget planning, but at least it disclosed key figures when it comes to state administration.
What is especially worrisome is the fact that in the first year of implementation of the Public Administration Reform Strategy until 2020 such important document has not been prepared and presented to the public, although this Strategy sets the optimization of the number of employees in public administration as one of its top priorities.
In the recently published report “Public Administration Reform: How Far Is 2020?”, prepared with the support of the European Union within the project “Civil Society for Good Governance: To Act and Account!”, Institute Alternative warned of the poor implementation of strategic activities.
During the first 11 months of implementation of the Strategy, 60% of the activities were not carried out within the deadline.
Milena Milošević
Public Policy Researcher
