A Study Of Software Multi-projects Scheduling Problem Considering Soft Skills Of Knowledge Workers

Software enterprises are typical knowledge-intensive enterprises and also typical project-oriented enterprises which can create high value-added products and services. Faced with costumers’ diverse and individualized demands, multi-projects management has become the biggest challenge for software projects managers. Resource conflict is the prominent problem for software multi-projects scheduling due to human resources sharing. Knowledge workers who own knowledge, skills and experience which relates to the efficiency and quality of projects are the core competitiveness of software enterprises. Project management practice shows soft skills of knowledge workers play an important role in the software projects management. So considering the soft skill factor in the multi-projects scheduling environment is of vital significance for software project management practice.For better to solve the human resources conflicts in software multi-projects scheduling and explore the soft skills’ impact on software project scheduling, this paper makes the following research.Firstly, based on the related theory of software project scheduling and research status, software multi-projects scheduling problem is defined after the analysis of project scheduling elements combing with knowledge workers’ features and software project tasks’ characteristics. And then software multi-projects scheduling base model is built under the condition of tasks’ timing constraints and human resources’ constraints aiming at minimizing human resources cost and project tasks’ delay penalties cost.Secondly, on the basis of the base model, the hard skills and soft skills of knowledge workers are defined and soft skills’ impact on software project scheduling is analyzed. And then the soft skills matching model between knowledge workers and tasks is added to the base model. The software multi-projects scheduling extended model is proposed under the condition of tasks’ timing constraints and human resources’ constraints aiming at maximizing the matching degree of knowledge workers and tasks’ soft skills.Lastly, for the above two software multi-projects scheduling models with the timing constraints and human resources constraints, a two-stage algorithm with constraints being decomposed step by step is designed. The problem instance is combined with the models and algorithm to verify the two models are feasible and the algorithm is valid. Project schedule plan is made under the timing constraints and project tasks list is determined based on this plan. Genetic algorithm is used to optimize the allocation of human resources under the human resources constraints. After the check and adjustment of resources, project scheduling schemes based on the above two models are given.