Successful Hospital Personnel Scheduling

The practice of Management Science involves the search for a solution, or improvement, to a particular problem. All too often, though, Management Science is taken to be the application of sophisticated Management Science tools.

This paper describes a situation in which a nonquantitative person with a problem, three students of Management Science, and one faculty member, were reminded of the above principle.

The scheduling of shift-personnel is an on-going problem over a wide range of functions. In many of these cases, a “quick-and-dirty” method can be applied instead of sophisticated, computer-based models. The procedure described in this paper saves one man-week of effort during each planning period, with no increase in computer use or hardware.