Integrated short-term staffing and long-term resource action planning for services projects

In a portfolio of services projects, each project manager delivers a resource request to the resource deployment manager. The request is in the form of a network of activities, where each activity can be staffed at multiple levels of resource-staffing using various skill-types. Each level of staffing implies a specific duration for the activity and, hence, the project. Activities can be either immediately staffed with specific resources, or planned for, with respect to future needs depending on their timing in the horizon of interest. We propose an integrated method to address both the immediate short term staffing level, and the planned, long term staffing level for a portfolio of requests using two-time-scale optimization formulation. In the short-term, the level of staffing for each immediate activity is decided for each project request, subject to short-term resource availability in each skill type and substitutability among skill types. In the long-term, a planned level of staffing for each of the corresponding activities within each project request is decided, to further carry out a resource action planning exercise. The resource action considers regular hiring, contracting and cross-training among skill types.