Proactive Operations Management: Staff Allocation with Competence Maintenance Constraints

Abstract

Highly qualified staff are the key to successful operations management in any organization. In this paper, the emphasis is put on the problem of planning the rotational assignment of work tasks to a multi-skilled staff to guarantee maintaining their competencies at the required level. The aim of this study is to propose a novel declarative model for proactive planning of staff allocation whilst taking into account the forgetting effect. Sufficient conditions are proposed that allow for the cyclical rotation of employees between different tasks in order to keep their competencies at a constant level. The numerical experiments prove that the presented approach allows for finding a trade-off between a robustness to absenteeism and maintaining staff competency levels. The proposed method is suitable for human resource-related decision making in an interactive mode.

Robust Scheduling of Multi-Skilled Workforce Allocation: Job Rotation Approach

“…Therefore, this article represents an extension of previous research on proactive resource allocation within competency structure constraints [22][23][24][25] and is a continuation of the authors' recent research presented at the International Conference on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence, 2023 [26].…”

Project Portfolio Planning Taking into Account the Effect of Loss of Competences of Project Team Members

“…Unfortunately, the availability of multi-skilled employees necessary in the conditions of short-run or unit multi-assortment production [6,7], as well as the need to guarantee robustness toward employee absenteeism, are significant limitations here. These limitations are also compounded by various factors determining workers' productivity, including ergonomic conditions of workplaces (exposure to noise and vibration), levels of perceived fatigue and boredom, as well as risks related to the reduction of qualification levels caused by forgetfulness [8][9][10]. The last of these factors becomes particularly noticeable in the case of the multi-task dynamic planning of software projects (e.g., scheduling of a portfolio of IT projects) [11], defined as a Dynamic Software Project Scheduling (DSPS) [12,13].…”

“…In the above context, this study refers to our previous work on the assessment of a competence structure's robustness to employee absenteeism and job rotation planning, guaranteeing the maintenance of employees' competences at a given constant level [10,20]. In turn, this contribution is an attempt to use the previously gained experience for situations in which environmental dynamics play a major role.…”