The entire National Park Service has a budget and staffing level that is just about identical to the budget and staffing level of my very own University of Rochester. The NPS budget request for this year was $3.1 billion. The U of R budget for the last year they reported it to the government was about $2.5 billion (and that was three years ago), so I suspect their spending is roughly the same today. The NPS has 21,500 employees. The U of R? We have about 10,000 on the direct payroll and this report says there are about 20,000 total employees affiliated with the U of R.
Are there lessons here? That’s certainly where the parallels end (I think).
Forty-one thousand employees, more or less, in just two organizations! Over five billion spent in total. A huge business opportunity, to an operating specialist.
I am not necessarily saying one would focus on, say, a fifteen percent reduction in payroll cost for openers. Remember productivity is the ratio of output over input, and labor productivity is only a piece of productivity broadly defined. I was just imagining selling Rochester’s President on the first project. I would suggest lunch at the $14,000 picnic table after the presentation and tell him our Analysis would reveal larger operating problems.
Alas, I was never part of a project that did an academic institution, but it would be no different from doing a hospital, or a manufacturing plant, or a sales operation, or the Park Service. I never walked into any area where it was not screwed up to one degree or another.