A shortage of personnel can seriously affect an organisation and its business processes. Personnel may be absent unexpectedly due to illness, accidents, strikes, or death. Furthermore, expected absences of personnel due to holidays or training programs must be considered. In addition, normal terminations of employment must be taken into account, especially when the time the employee is still available for work is shortened due to accrued vacation time. Shortage of personnel may also be caused by an internal change in the workplace.

Examples:

• The network administrator of one company was off work as the result of a prolonged illness. The company network continued to operate without error at first. However, two weeks later the system crashed and no one was able to eliminate the error because this employee was the only one trained in the operation of the network. As a result, the network was unavailable for several days.
• While an administrator was on holiday, the backup media stored in a data safe were needed. The access code for the safe had been changed just prior to this, and the administrator was the only person who knew the new access code. It was only possible to restore the data after several days because it was impossible to reach the administrator any faster, as the administrator was on holiday.
• If there is a pandemic, increasing numbers of personnel will be absent for extended periods of time as the pandemic spreads, whether this is due to the illness itself or the need to take care of children and family members. Some employees will not go to work due to the fear of becoming infected in public transportation or in the organisation. As a consequence, it will only be possible to perform the most essential tasks. The maintenance required for systems, such as the central server or the air-conditioning system in the computer centre, cannot be performed any more. More and more systems will fail as time goes by due to the lack of maintenance.

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