HUMAN RESOURCE FORECASTING AND VIABILITY OF SMALL BUSINESS ENTERPRISES IN RIVERS STATE, NIGERIA
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
 1.1    Background of the Study
The survival of business organizations hinges on the availability of capital to keep the business running. However, central to the growth, viability and continued survival of any organization be it private or public, academic or social, manufacturing or nonmanufacturing; is the utilization of capital by the human element of the organization. The quality of human resources ensures effective combination of other resources – time, money (no matter how vast the financial resources), materials, technology (no matter how sophisticated the machines, tools and equipment), etc. in the most appropriate manner in order to achieve stated organizational objectives. Human resources or human capital is so critical to organizational survival such that it has, judging by today’s complex business environment, been acclaimed as the most important resource available to any organization going by the assertion of Nnadozie and Nwana (1993) that employees are the most valuable resources of any organization. This view is also echoed by Ewurum and Unamka (1995) who argue that the most important asset of an organization is its human resources, otherwise referred to as manpower.
The success or failure of the organization hinges on the calibre of its work force and the quality of the effort put in the service of the organization. The policies and programme an organization devises for its manpower resources are of crucial importance because people differ widely in the range and type of their abilities, in their character, attitudes, general behaviour, in their interests and motivation. To achieve maximum efficiency, therefore, individuals and jobs must be managed and matched. In an ideal business organization, human resources and management enjoy a symbiotic relationship which ensures none can survive or grow without the other. It is the human element in the organization that performs its management functions while management is also burdened with the responsibility of combining and coordinating the human, financial, material and other resources to achieve the goals of the organization. Griffin (1997) defines management as a set of activities (including planning and decision-making, organizing, leading and controlling) directed at an organization’s resources (human, financial, material and information) with the aim of achieving organizational goals in an effective and efficient manner. Therefore, human resources are very important and occupy a cardinal position in management. This implies that one is safe to say that human resource management is the pivot of all sorts of management in an organization.
An important development in human resources management is manpower planning. As a crucial matter, manpower planning has spread rapidly to every organization in almost every kind of business. There is no organization that can function very well even if it is well to do technologically, financially and otherwise without a well designed manpower planning process (Obi, 2003). To get a better understanding of what manpower planning is and how it has emerged, the evolution and development of manpower planning will be described. Since the origins of the modern industrial organization, human resource planning has been a management function (Walker, 1980). Division of labour, specialization, organization of management into levels, work simplification, and application of standards for selection employees and measuring their performance were all principles applied early in industrial management.
