Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 10/13/03 issue

All together now: USMC manpower system becomes a real force

By Shawn P. McCarthy, Special to GCN

When it comes to personnel administration, the special needs of government offices can make it difficult to implement standard, commercial human resources systems. This is particularly true for branches of the military.

Defense Department HR officials not only manage widely dispersed forces, they also track unique workflows, complex roles and permissions, rank assignments, pay grades, temporary reassignments and more.

Combine this complexity with sprawling legacy systems, and many government HR departments find it easier to create their own HR systems than to install commercial ones that usually need to be customized.

That was the situation faced by the Manpower & Reserve Affairs office at the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Va.

The office developed an ongoing program called the Total Force Administration System, that will be rolling out in stages over the next few years—with updates and improvements anticipated through 2011.

Too much customization

“We did not find a software vendor with a product ready to go,” said Maj. Steven A. Simmons, TFAS project officer. “They all needed major customization to meet our requirements.”

Marine Online (MOL), the Web application for the TFAS program, is set to start this fall. It lets Marines access much of their own personnel data and update selected items.

It also gives company commanders and unit leaders access to personnel data and processes for the Marines who are in that company.

TFAS was developed and implemented by a project team of acquisition officers from the Marine Corps Systems Command, functional managers from Marine Manpower and Reserve Affairs at Quantico and software engineers from the Defense Finance and Accounting Service’s Technology Services Organization in Kansas City, Mo.

In the mid-1990s, Marine personnel administrators, like leaders in many government offices, were stuck with shuffling a lot of paper and doing redundant data entry into multiple systems.

“To get information in and out of the system, we needed trained administrators who knew special codes,” Simmons said.
The Corps is “on the cusp of a major revolution” in how it handles manpower processes. —Maj. Steven A. Simmons
Image:
The Corps is “on the cusp of a major revolution” in how it handles manpower processes.

More news on related topics: Defense IT, IT in Action, The Community