Managing the Competencies of Team Members in Design Projects through Multi-period Task Assignment

Abstract

Abstract. Product design projects involve multiple team members with various knowledge and competencies that have to evolve with time, due to rapid organizational, technological and marketing changes. Project managers require management methods to optimize the assignment of tasks to human resources according to their competency levels and the need for competency evolution. In this paper, we tackle this optimization problem in the context of multiple design projects and multiple periods. The model we propose seeks to minimize two function objectives: (i) minimize the supplementary salary cost due to the extended task duration when using under-competent employees and (ii) minimize the financial penalties when the competency goals have not been reached. This problem has been solved by means of a simulated annealing -based optimization algorithm.

Flexible resources allocation techniques: characteristics and modelling

“…the evolution of competences with growing experience -see e.g. the works of Gutjahr et al (2008) and Hlaoittinun et al (2010)): our only interest is to present a flexible model that can be used to reduce the project cost, by using multi-skilled workforce and flexible working time strategy. In the following sections, we will introduce the different model significations and its different dimensions.…”

“…We can find this heterogeneous nature of the multi-skilled actors' efficiencies in different applications, e.g. in the service centres (Valls et al, 2009), information technologies' projects (Heimerl and Kolisch, 2009), product design and development (Hlaoittinun et al, 2010) and the projects portfolio selection (Gutjahr et al, 2008). There are many forms of modelling the workforce efficiencies, aiming at quantifying each one, and from which one can calculate the project tasks' durations.…”

“…Duquenne et al, 2005;Gutjahr et al, 2008). But, Hlaoittinun et al (2010) described it as a multiplication factor within the interval [1,2]: if the actor has a value of unity for a given competence, he will work with the standard duration to execute the corresponding task; but if he has a value of '2', the task execution time will be doubled. For Heimerl and Kolisch (2009), these efficiencies take values greater than zero.…”

Factors affecting the development of workforce versatility

“…And, concerning the static heterogeneous implementation we can find the work of Heimerl and Kolisch (2009);Attia et al (2012). The dynamic heterogeneous consideration is described in Sayin and Karabati (2007); Hlaoittinun et al (2010); Attia, et al (2011a).…”

Business Process Driven Matching of Partner Profiles to Resource Requirements

“…Recent research investigated several metrics of the dimensions mentioned before for competence profiles [6,10]. In this context three research questions need to be addressed: (1) Which requirements have to be fulfilled by the new partners?…”