Effective Decision Support for Workforce Deployment Service Systems

An IT services businesses must continually manage the assignment and movement of practitioners to or between projects balancing multiple objectives (1) to minimize their idle bench, while aiming (2) to increase revenue from new project opportunities. The key to simultaneously achieving these objectives is a well managed Service System for Workforce Deployment with distributed decision making. In this paper, we discuss the decision support needs for this Service System, and present a decision support tool that computes an 'optimal' assignment of practitioners to projects,and improves the effectiveness and efficiency of this assignment process. The tool comprises of a matching module that matches practitioners to project openings, an optimization module that produces globally optimal recommendations, and a user interface for displaying the recommendations. We describe the decision support tool, our experiences with developing and deploying it in an IT services company, and our efforts to promote a common shared perspective among decision-makers enabling multiple decision makers to independently arrive at near-optimal decisions using the tool recommendations.