A runtime-restricted strategy for highly parallel scheduling human resource in change management

The uncertainty of change and low-utilization of human resource make change management more difficult to implement in today's competitive IT management environment. To fill this gap, in this paper a novel strategy is proposed for scheduling human resource to change activities concerning both runtime and business impact. Strategy is heuristic-based to obtain (1) ordering of human operators by mining potential individual skills, and (2) ordering of change activities based on improved critical path method, and then scheduling humans to activities with business constraints. Note that, before the activities are ordered, the splitting-regrouping of the complicated change workflow should be considered first by the concepts of computable dependency and cluster. The approach has been validated by a small but realistic case. Results showed that, compared to previous studies, our novel strategy is more suitable for highly parallel time-critical scenarios.