Workforce management in project-oriented shared service organization

The typical project-oriented service organizations conduct dozens of projects and programs every year. A common occurrence in these organizations is many requests from business units with no apparent link to strategy goals. So they often face workforce management and project prioritization issues with a constrained budget and limited human resources. Research and experience indicate that the governance of workforce and project prioritization is critical to organization success. This article reviews actions that a shared service organization taken to meet resource-competing requests from multiple business units. Specifically, the authors discuss some key advanced technologies such as a complete model for selecting projects, skill representation and resource allocation problem, together with experiences gained from a bank in Asia Pacific.