A Resource Planning Model for Professional Services Organizations

Professional services firms are project based. Execution of these projects involve identifying and planning for the right skills. In this paper, we model the problem of predicting the skills requirement for the projects in the pipeline of a professional services firm from the bill of resources of some similar projects that had been executed in the past by the firm. This tactical decision problem is modeled as a graph clustering problem by representing the projects as nodes of the graph. Agglomerative clustering heuristic is applied for optimally clustering the nodes of the graph. The proposed model is analyzed for a simple case in which there are five projects in the history of a professional services firm.