Staff Hiring and Reassignment Based on Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling

The implementation of a set of projects within an organization can be scheduled through a project scheduling procedure, that is based on the organizational resources available, such as the number of teams and team members, and the tasks that each team must perform. Nevertheless, hiring new personnel (staff hiring) and rearranging the members among the existing teams (staff reassignment) can lead to better scheduling solutions. This can potentially have a large financial impact for the organization, as it will reduce the projects’ implementation cost and will bring products earlier to market. To this end, this work presents different approaches to solve the resource-constrained project scheduling problem considering the reassignment of existing personnel as well as the hiring of new personnel. This is achieved by modifying a previously presented integer linear program (ILP) formulation to solve the aforementioned problem and considering different objectives and scenarios for staff hiring and reassignment. From the results obtained, it is evident that by using the developed ILPs, an organization can schedule its projects in a more time- and cost-efficient manner through the newly proposed recruitment and staff reassignment processes, compared to the benchmark approach that considers only existing personnel and team compositions.