Coping with Fluctuating Demand for Professional Staff: A Prescription and Examples

Since professionals tend to be highly paid and slow to recruit and train, the professional staffing problem is nontrivial, vexatious, and persistent. Predictions help little when changes in demand are unforeseeable, but two practical planning policies tend to make serious miscalculations unlikely. Dynamic-simulation experiments on an actual technical-service company show that the solution is simply to (1) be generous with overtime in response to backlog, and (2) hire or fire in a timely manner, but sparingly. A simple verbal analysis, comparison with actual data, and an application to a manufacturing firm support the above results.