Title: Decision rules for the project selection and scheduling problem of professional service firms

Authors: Michael Hoeck

Addresses: Institute of Industrial Management, University of Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 5, 20146 Hamburg, Germany

Abstract: This paper deals with two decision rules for the project selection and scheduling problem of professional service firms, such as IT, accounting, law and consulting firms. In brief, the decision problem can be characterised as how much of the available personnel capacity should be assigned to orders under negotiation and how much should be reserved for projects to come. In practice, the decision-making process is often based on a target ROI and a rough-cut capacity requirements planning. In the following study a Revenue Management (RM) technique is applied to the project selection and scheduling problem. A numerical experiment indicates that the new approach outperforms the traditional decision rule in a market environment with moderately stable prices.

Keywords: project selection; scheduling; revenue management; professional service firms; target ROI; capacity requirements planning; decision making.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSOM.2008.017428

International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 2008 Vol.4 No.4, pp.427 - 440

Published online: 07 Mar 2008 *

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