A heuristic approach to project staffing

In this paper we consider a company with a matrix organization where employees are members of departments and project teams at the same time, i.e. the employees have to accomplish operational work within their department apart from project work. The employees have different skills while projects require some of these skills. It is the aim to minimize the number of assignments of employees to projects. For this staffing problem we present a minimum cost network flow model. We prove that the problem is NP-hard and provide a heuristic solution approach.