Adaptive virtual team planning and coordination: a mathematical programming approach

Abstract

Purpose The rise of remote work increasingly requires organizations to coordinate a single large, consolidated talent pool into ad-hoc, short-term project teams on demand. This problem involves many simultaneous considerations including project revenues and rejection costs, conflicting projects and roles, worker assignment costs, worker utilization preferences and limits, worker reassignment costs, and arbitrary role start and end times. Moreover, plans must be continuously updated in response to changing circumstances. This paper addresses the problem of dynamic virtual team planning and coordination. Design/methodology/approach We show this problem is NP-hard and provide a dynamic mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for both optimal initial plan generation as well as continuous plan adjustment and re-optimization. We utilized a factorial experiment design to generate benchmark problems spanning a wide range of characteristics and conducted extensive computational experimentation using a common MILP solver. Findings Exactly optimal solutions to large, realistically sized problems were consistently obtained in short amounts of time. All observed solution times were sufficient to support the operational decision-making requirements of real-world virtual team coordination, demonstrating the viability of this approach. Practical implications The approach developed in this research can enable organizations to optimally coordinate virtual teams on a large scale and continually adjust plans in response to changing circumstances, all in an automated manner. Originality/value This paper addresses a new and complex problem of increasing importance to organizations due to the rise in remote work. We provide a problem formulation and exact approach for optimally solving both the planning and re-planning aspects of this problem.