Multiskilled Project Management Workforce Assignment across Multiple Projects Regarding Competency

Abstract

Contractors attempt to manage optimal collection of human capital that can optimize the company’s performance. The skills and competency of human resources contribute considerably to the competitive advantage of the firm. Yet the skill shortage problem encourages utilizing strategies that bring more flexibility to workforce management. Multiskilling has been suggested as a potential strategy that assists workforce assignment across multiple projects. However, it brings new challenges for company workforce managers. This study contributes to the construction project management body of knowledge by proposing a simulation framework for assigning multiskilled, mainly managerial, workforces across multiple projects of one company. Meanwhile, it is a combination of a staffng and scheduling decision model, incorporating workers’ competency status. A cohesive mathematical model using the cost objective function optimizes the entire allocation process toward minimizing resource usage and fluctuations, minimizing costs, and maximizing social sustainability. Ultimately, a validation example incorporating diverse workers’ competency data is provided to exemplify how the optimization model performs in an academic setting compared with three commonly used methods in workforce assignment. This approach provides insight into simulating workforce assignments across multiple projects regarding competency.