1.1 INTRODUCTION

The public and private organizations generate staff records. Staff records play an imperative role in providing the information needed by organizations to manage and pay their staff members, plan their workforce requirements and monitor staff performance. Ultimately, any organization’s development and sustainability will depend on sound and effective human resource management, and the approaches it chooses to follow will be derived in part from an analysis of the information contained in staff records. The goal of staff records management is to ensure that a complete and comprehensive employment history of each employee is readily available for as long as it is needed, and that the information contained in staff records supports the management, deployment, payment and development of staff. Other key objectives of staff records management are to support transparency and organizational accountability and to enable accurate audits by creating and protecting human resource records as reliable evidence (Griffin and Hoyle, 2009).

According to Cain et al (1997) organizations need to keep staff information for long periods. For example, retention periods of 70 years or longer for staff files are common in many countries. Thus, staff databases need to store data about individuals for decades – far longer periods that is typical for most database applications.

1.2 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

The development of personnel management dates back to the period of World War I around the year 1915 and more recently to the human relations movement of 1935 – 1950.

In one of the studies of Elton mayor, he discovered that psychological factors as well as social factors influence individuals at work rather than physical factors. 

Specific reasons for the development of personnel management include: -

(i) As a result of increasing influence of trade unions, traditionally personnel administration took on the role of pacifying the trade unions, so that management could be free run the companies   without interference fromemployees.

(ii) The formulation of minimum wages low costs and individual legislations increased the need for a team of personnelspecialties.

(iii) As the union became more sophisticated and powerful theneed for highly skilled individual relations shouldincrease.

(iv) The increasing size of business, government and other institutions brought new dimension into the profession of personnel management.

Traditionally, it was practiced in homes where the father is the head of the family. It was he who planned what the family should do, the type of farming, size and where to sell the harvested products. His wives and children helped in the process, no external recruitment was involved, so the more wives and children a man had, the more likely it was that the family be well-of. The recent practices of personnel management in Nigeria is tied up with history and development of the public services, private companies and civil services.

1.3 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

This study aims at developing a computer-based staff management system for Lagos Waste Management Authority. However, other rationales of the study include the following:

• To design a backup scheme Timely and quality output to managers for decision making

• To design a project that eliminates the problems encountered in the manual system of personnel management operations by the use of this computerized Personnel Management System software.

• Providing specific type of output according to specified input which also aims at providing a well secure database management system for the records. 

1.4 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEMS.

Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation uses conventional paper based staff system. They keep their employees staff records by filing it on file cabinets. The information of employees that are being kept include service records, appointment of permanent employees, appointment forms, confirmation, accumulated leaves, numbers of absence or tardiness and leave. All these records can efficiently be managed by staff management system where you can inquire into employees’ record at any time the user wants in order to check employment history, accumulated leaves and sickness time, plus variety of staff data such as education, beneficiary and emergency notifications information

Following the problem in Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, there were cases were files get missing, cabinet gets jammed delaying the presentation of certain information about the staff, destruction of files and records in the case of fire outbreaks, time required to record as well as presenting an Information and also the cost of purchasing files, paper and furniture and fixtures.

Lack of effectiveness in their methods of record keeping, further compounds the problem. 

1.5 JUSTIFICATION OF THE STUDY

This work could be useful for personnel managers or officers in an organization as well as those involved in research work on personnel management. However, this research work would let us know that the success of an organization largely depends on the assessment and appraisal of individuals and company employee’s potential, performance and how well the organization can strive to equip all its workers.

Hence, this research work will be of immense assistance to the organizational environment because personnel will be able to find the best solution to the various personnel problems as the computerized personnel management information system software will play a very big role in removing the stress in record keeping. 

There are many other advantages, and some of them are listed below. 

• It saves a lot of time in processing personnel information. 

• Database access is fast, reliable and secure in term of authorized access using dataencryption and decryption.

• Transactions are secured (login page).

• It helps in reducing the costs of labour, fixtures and stationary(Paper, files, pens,marker and so on.

1.6 SCOPE OF THE STUDY

This research work will concentrate on staff employment form which includes the name, sex, location in fact information about the staff, performance assessment, retirement and handling of some queries like; updating staff record, deleting staff record and searching for staff information via Rank, Department or ID as the case may be. It is a case study of Nigeria Petroleum Corporation Lagos. 

1.7 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

The importance of staff management system cannot be overemphasized in an organization as it helps toassuage the workloads of staff in human resources department. This will also ease processing of documentssuch as manual generation of reports and employees data. This research will help this organization to organize staff information by providing a database for easy access, monitoring, controlling and updatingtheir personal information. This research work will computerize the conventional paper-based operations ofhuman resources and management office of Nigeria Petroleum Corporation Lagos in terms ofstaff management system. Also, the research work will enable the staff information to be easily tracked forediting staff information. The proposed information system is a stepping stone and a challenge for theresearcher to continuously improve their knowledge on research and system analysis, design andimplementation. This will also serve as a basis for future system development

1.8 Research Questions

This research work will be guided by the following research questions:

(i). Why proposing a Staff Management System (SMS) for the organization. Is it really important?

(ii). How will the proposed computer-based staff management system affect the existing conventional system?

1.9 LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

Due to time constraint, finance and confidentiality of information, program developed covers all aspect of employment, assessment and retirement. Whatever is left out is as a result of the stated limitations.

1.10 ASSUMPTION OF THE STUDY

During the process of data collection, information relating to personal management was obtained from Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation Lagos. The information was collected from the admin staffduring the course of my industrial attachment. Hence, it is assumed that all the data collected are correct and contains no false information.

1.11 DEFINITION OF TERMS/ VARIABLES

Personnel:It is a department in an organization that deals withemployeesrecords, hiring or retirement. 

Management:It is the co-ordination of all the resources of an organization through the process of planning, organization, directing and controlling.

Public sector:The industries and services that are owned andrun by the government.

Private sector:The industries and services that are owned and run by private companies.

System: A method or set of procedures even personnel working together as a whole to achieve a goal.

Data: Numbers, Text or image which is in the form suitable forstorage inor processing by a computer, or an incomplete information.

Information:A meaning full material derived from computer data by organizing it and interpreting it in aspecified way.

Input: Data entered into a computer for storage or processing.

Output: Information produced from a computer after processing.

Information System: A set of interrelated components that collect (or retrieve), process, store and distribute information to support decisionmaking and control in an organization. 

1.12 ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY

• Chapter one of the study deals with the introductory aspect of the topic, its essence and importance to every organization when it comes to staff management.

• Chapter two deal with the review of related literature on the topic

• Chapter three is all about the methodology of the design, the design itself.

• Chapter four talks about the implementation of the design.

• Chapter five concludes the topic and gives recommendations