A Consulting Firm Uses Constraint Programming to Plan Personnel-Review Meetings

A medium-sized consulting firm uses constraint programming to plan its annual meetings of groups of partners to conduct personnel reviews of its consultant-employees. Key constraints include discussing every knowledgeable partner-consultant relationship in at least one meeting; keeping meetings manageable by limiting the number of partners attending and the number of consultants discussed; restricting the number of meetings each partner attends; and requiring the partners who attend each meeting to represent multiple practice areas. Our objective is to minimize the number of situations in which a consultant who is discussed at a meeting has only one knowledgeable partner attending the meeting. Running the model has saved partners from attending meetings unnecessarily and reduced the time required to develop a meeting plan from a few days to a few hours. It has been part of the review-planning process for the past two and a half years.