Personnel Roster Research Articles

Analysis of Bureacracy Downsizing in Indonesia by Using Strategic Action Field Framework

Introduction: The purpose of this article is to find out how the strategic action field capacity of the Indonesian bureaucracy on bureaucratic simplification has been implemented. Literature Review: The meaning of delayering, with reference to such metaphors, is commonly taken to describe the planned vertical compression of various levels of the managerial hierarchy, including the wholesale removal of one or more levels of managerial or supervisory staff from an organization's personnel roster. (Keuning and Opheij, 1994; Miller and Longair, 1985; Wheatley, 1992). Method: This research uses qualitative research through primary data collection through interviews and secondary data through literature study. Result and Discussion: The results show that bureaucratic simplification has not been proven effective in improving the performance of the bureaucracy in Indonesia, it is still only at the stage of fulfilling administrative obligations. Conclusions: Key findings as novelty in studies related to implementation of bureaucratic policy researchers with locus Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministries of Religion, Ministry for Rural and Rural Development of the Remnant, and Ministries for State Apparatus Disclosure and Reforms The bureaucracy suggests that organizational capacity must be derived from individual capacity, as the primary capital of an organization before making organizational change.

A column generation-based diving heuristic to solve the multi-project personnel staffing problem with calendar constraints and resource sharing

Project managers are often responsible for the management of multiple projects and associated personnel budgeting decisions. In order to determine the workforce size and mix accurately, we integrate the multi-project scheduling problem and personnel staffing problem. We construct a baseline personnel roster that takes the personnel scheduling constraints into account and model the workload stemming from the project activities as an endogenous variable in the model. In order to decrease the overall staffing budget, we consider the sharing of resources, i.e. personnel resources can be transferred between projects. In the problem under study, we consider unproductive resource transfer times and different restrictions related to the sharing of resources imposed on the schedule of individual workers, which is often neglected in the literature. We propose a multi-stage solution procedure that exploits the optimal linear programming solution, obtained via column generation, to find a high-quality integer solution based on a diving heuristic. In order to improve the computational performance, different speed-up mechanisms are included relying on a state space reduction. Detailed computational experiments are presented to evaluate and benchmark different alternative optimisation strategies. Managerial insights are provided which give insight in the benefits of resource sharing.

Workforce Diversity in Police Hiring: The Influence of Organizational Characteristics

In recent years, many law enforcement agencies have found themselves in legitimacy crises, where police have difficulty winning the support and trust of the communities that they serve. One strategy suggested to improve legitimacy is developing personnel rosters that share demographic characteristics with a jurisdiction’s service population. This study examines how characteristics of police agencies, including existing workforce diversity, predict subsequent success in hiring non-White applicants. We merge applicant and hiring data from agencies reporting to the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA) with organizational data from the Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies (CSLLEA). Results suggest that existing workforce diversity and some measures of organizational complexity influence successful hiring of non-White applicants.

A decomposed branch-and-price procedure for integrating demand planning in personnel staffing problems

The personnel staffing problem calculates the required workforce size and is determined by constructing a baseline personnel roster that assigns personnel members to duties in order to cover certain staffing requirements. In this research, we incorporate the planning of the duty demand in the staff scheduling problem in order to lower the staffing costs. More specifically, the demand originates from a project scheduling problem with discrete time/resource trade-offs, which embodies additional flexibility as activities can be executed in different modes. In order to tackle this integrated problem, we propose a decomposed branch-and-price procedure. A tight lower and upper bound are calculated using a problem formulation that models the project scheduling constraints and the time-related resource scheduling constraints implicitly in the decision variables. Based upon these bounds, the strategic problem is decomposed into multiple tactical subproblems with a fixed workforce size and an optimal solution is searched for each subproblem via branch-and-price. Fixing the workforce size in a subproblem facilitates the definition of resource capacity cuts, which limit the set of eligible project schedules, decreasing the size of the branching tree. In addition, in order to find the optimal integer solution, we propose a specific search strategy based upon the lower bound and dedicated rules to branch upon the workload generated by a project schedule. The computational results show that applying the proposed search space decomposition and the inclusion of resource capacity cuts lead to a well-performing procedure outperforming different other heuristic and exact methodologies.

Planowanie przydziału kompetencji odpornego na nieprzewidziane absencje pracowników

In order to deal with unexpected events such as employee absenteeism and/or a demand for personnel that is higher or lower than expected, organizations need to adopt proactive and reactive scheduling strategies to protect the personnel roster and to respond to this operational variability, respectively. In this paper, we discuss a proactive approach that exploits the concept of employee substitutability to improve the flexibility of a personnel shift roster to respond to schedule disruptions. With a view to developing a DSS-driven method dedicated to competence allocation planning robust to unexpected staff absenteeism, we present the concept of the so-called robust employee competence structure. A declarative model of the concept allows to find an employee competence structure robust to a given set of disruptions while guaranteeing an admissible personnel allocation to the assumed set of tasks. Since the problem of designing such a robust structure is NP-hard, another goal of the present study is to propose a sufficient condition the fulfilment of which will guarantee the validity of calculations. Potential applications of the proposed solution are discussed using examples

Competence-driven employee substitutability planning robust to unexpected staff absenteeism

Abstract In order to deal with unexpected events such as employee absenteeism and/or a demand for personnel that is higher or lower than expected, organizations need to adopt proactive and reactive scheduling strategies to protect the personnel roster and to respond to this operational variability, respectively. In this paper, we propose a preemptive programming approach to construct a personnel shift roster that maximizes the employee substitutability. A proactive approach builds in a certain degree of robustness in the original roster. This built-in robustness improves both the absorption and adjustment capability of the original roster during the operational allocation phase when unexpected events occur. With a view to developing a DSS-driven method dedicated to competence allocation planning robust to unexpected staff absenteeism, we present a methodology, based on constraints programming and robust employee competence structure concepts. Introduced approach allows to find an employee competence structure robust to a given set of disruptions while guaranteeing an admissible personnel allocation to the assumed set of tasks. Potential applications of the proposed solution are discussed using examples.

A perturbation matheuristic for the integrated personnel shift and task re-scheduling problem

In this paper, we propose a heuristic optimisation procedure for the integrated personnel shift and task re-scheduling problem. We assume that schedule disruptions arise as the baseline personnel roster is subject to three sources of operational variability, i.e. uncertainty of capacity, uncertainty of demand and uncertainty of arrival. In order to restore the feasibility of the personnel roster and to minimise the number of deviations compared to the original roster, we propose a heuristic re-scheduling procedure that thrives on a perturbation mechanism to diversify the search and a variable neighbourhood search to intensify the search in the region of a solution point. In the computational experiments, we assess the contribution of the different algorithmic building blocks and benchmark our algorithm with other optimisation procedures.

Thierschstraße 41: Hitler the Lodger, a Jewish Landlord, and a Restitution Problem

Paul Hoser Thierschstraße 41 Hitler the Lodger, a Jewish Landlord, and a Restitution Problem From the Barracks to a Rented Room Adolf Hitler was discharged from the army on March 31, 1920. Up until this point, he had received his army pay and allowances, plus free lodging and meals.1 He had even chosen not to apply for any benefits to which he might have been entitled.2 It is not known for certain how he supported himself during the subsequent months of 1920. With his discharge into civilian life came a change of address in Munich: Hitler moved from the barracks to a rented room. On May 1, 1920, he moved out of the 2nd Infantry Regiment’s barracks at Lothstraße 29 and into Thierschstraße 41 in the Lehel district of the city.3 He moved into a room on the second floor of this house, which was otherwise occupied by the businessman Ernst Reichert and his wife Maria. The room had been allocated to him by the housing office.4 Hitler was 1 See Volker Ullrich, Adolf Hitler. Biographie, vol. 1: Die Jahre des Aufstiegs 1889–1939, Frankfurt a. M. 2013, p. 109; Othmar Plöckinger, Unter Soldaten und Agitatoren. Hitlers prägende Jahre im deutschen Militär 1918–1920, Paderborn 2013, pp. 163–65, 177–78, and Thomas Weber, Wie Adolf Hitler zum Nazi wurde. Vom unpolitischen Soldaten zum Autor von “Mein Kampf,” Berlin 2016, pp. 262–63. The present English version of this article was shortened by Paul Hoser. It was originally published in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 65 (2017), pp. 131–61. 2 See Ernst Deuerlein, Hitlers Eintritt in die Politik und die Reichswehr, in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 7 (1959), pp. 177–227, here p. 182; a facsimile of Hitler’s wartime personnel roster is reprinted on p. 190. 3 On life in the barracks, see Anton Joachimsthaler, Hitlers Weg begann in München 1913–1923, expanded new edition, Munich 2000, p. 217; and on his move to Thierschstraße 41, Archive of the Institute for Contemporary History (Archiv des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte; henceforth: IfZ Archive ), ZS-287, fol. 2, “Protokoll der Unterredung von Georg Franz[-Willing] mit Antonie Reichert, 20.6.1952.” A facsimile of the registration form is reprinted in Joachimsthaler, Hitlers Weg, p. 21, with no source information. 4 IfZ Archive, ZS-287, fols. 2, 4, “Protokoll der Unterredung von Georg Franz[-Willing] mit Antonie Reichert, 20.6.1952.” According to Hermann Esser, it was Joseph Berchtold, as of 1923 the leader of the “Hitler Shock Troops” that later became the SS, who found the room for Hitler. Berchtold’s parents lived next door at No. 39. It is possible that Hitler was tipped off about the 124 Paul Hoser formally registered as the tenant of Maria Reichert’s father, valet Anton Dachs, who was still alive, and whose apartment was opposite that of his daughter.5 After his death, the apartment passed to his widow Karolina. The best-known account of Hitler’s rented room and its furnishings comes from Ernst Hanfstaengl, who had met him in the winter of 1922: The room that he occupied as the tenant of a Frau Reichert was clean and tidy, if somewhat small and cramped and not exactly lavishly furnished. The floor was covered with cheap, worn linoleum and a few small, threadbare rugs. Against the wall opposite the bed, whose bedposts partially obstructed the window, stood a chair and table, as well as some bare wooden shelving housing Hitler’s treasured books.6 Hitler was given breakfast by his landlords, and he read the newspapers while he ate. He generally came home late and got up late the next day.7 At lunchtime, he would go to the Party office in the Sterneckerbräu. He usually ate there, in some other cheap restaurant, or in the public soup kitchen on Theresienstraße.8 The offices of the Münchener Beobachter had been located at Thierschstraße 15 since October 15, 1919.9 Renamed the Völkischer Beobachter on January 3, 1920, the paper was acquired by the publishing house Franz Eher Nachf. on December room by Berchtold, and...

Optimised buffer allocation to construct stable personnel shift rosters

Organisations need to construct stable baseline personnel shift rosters based on forecasts about the future personnel demand and employee availability. However, variability arises in the short-term, which renders these forecasts incorrect and affects the quality of the personnel roster. In this paper, we study how to anticipate this variability by introducing capacity buffers in the personnel shift roster. We propose a new approach by solving an equivalent deterministic formulation of a stochastic personnel shift scheduling problem. In contrast to traditional approaches, the size and position of capacity buffers are not defined in advance but are adequately determined as an endogenous variable by the proposed optimisation model to align the available personnel capacity to the stochastic demand. We propose different strategies to define the anticipated uncertainty and to allocate capacity buffers accordingly. We validate the performance of these strategies through a comparison with a deterministic minimum cost strategy and a more traditional resource buffer strategy based on a three-step methodology. This methodology makes use of simulation and optimisation to mimic the hierarchical personnel planning process.

The impact of overtime as a time-based proactive scheduling and reactive allocation strategy on the robustness of a personnel shift roster

The workforce size and the overtime budget have an important impact on the total personnel costs of an organisation. Since the personnel costs represent a significant fraction of the operating costs, it is important to define an appropriate hiring and overtime policy. Overtime is defined as an extension of the daily working time or the total working time over the planning period. In this paper, we make the distinction between scheduled and unscheduled overtime when we define the overtime policy. Scheduled overtime is proactively assigned in the baseline personnel roster whereas unscheduled overtime is allocated as a reactive strategy to overcome operational disruptions. The hiring and overtime policy undoubtedly influence the robustness included in a personnel roster, i.e., the capability of an organisation to deal with roster disruptions at an acceptable cost. In this paper, we investigate the trade-off between the hiring budget and the overtime budget and the way overtime should be allocated in the personnel management process. The latter comprehends a trade-off between the proactive scheduling of overtime and the reservation of overtime to balance supply and demand in response to operational variability. Insights are obtained by exploring three different strategies to compose a personnel shift baseline roster. We verify the robustness of each of these strategies by applying a three-step methodology that thrives on optimisation and simulation and we formulate some managerial guidelines to define an appropriate hiring and overtime policy.

Employee substitutability as a tool to improve the robustness in personnel scheduling

Organisations usually construct personnel rosters under the assumption of a deterministic operating environment. In the short term, however, organisations operate in a stochastic environment as operational variability arises. This variability leads to the occurrence of unexpected events such as employee absenteeism and/or a demand for personnel that is higher or lower than expected. In order to deal with these uncertainties, organisations need to adopt proactive and reactive scheduling strategies to protect the personnel roster and to respond to this operational variability, respectively. In this paper, we discuss a proactive approach that exploits the concept of employee substitutability to improve the flexibility of a personnel shift roster to respond to schedule disruptions. We propose a pre-emptive programming approach to construct a medium-term personnel shift roster that maximises the employee substitutability value. Moreover, we assess different proactive strategies to introduce robustness with respect to the definition and formulation of employee substitutability and different reactive strategies that impact the decision freedom for schedule recovery. The robustness of the generated personnel shift rosters is evaluated using a three-step methodology of roster construction, daily simulation and optimisation, and evaluation.

A model enhancement heuristic for building robust aircraft maintenance personnel rosters with stochastic constraints

This paper presents a heuristic approach to optimize staffing and scheduling at an aircraft maintenance company. The goal is to build robust aircraft maintenance personnel rosters that can achieve a certain service level while minimizing the total labor costs. Robust personnel rosters are rosters that can handle delays associated with stochastic flight arrival times. To deal with this stochasticity, a model enhancement algorithm is proposed that iteratively adjusts a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to a stochastic environment based on simulation results. We illustrate the performance of the algorithm with a computational experiment based on real life data of a large aircraft maintenance company located at Brussels Airport in Belgium. The obtained results are compared to deterministic optimization and straightforward optimization. Experiments demonstrate that our model can ensure a certain desired service level with an acceptable increase in labor costs when stochasticity is introduced in the aircraft arrival times.

The impact of reserve duties on the robustness of a personnel shift roster: An empirical investigation

In personnel scheduling, a duty roster is typically constructed under the assumption of a deterministic model. However, organisations operate in a stochastic environment and the conjectures made about the demand for staff and the availability of employees may prove to be insufficient to represent reality. In order to anticipate these unexpected events, we investigate the impact of introducing reserve duties in the medium-term personnel shift roster. Reserve duties are scheduled by enforcing specific staffing requirements and/or time-related constraints that consider reserve duties only. We propose a three-step methodology that imitates the workforce management process to evaluate the delivered robustness in terms of the actual performance. After a personnel roster is constructed, unexpected events are simulated and an optimisation model determines the required adjustments to balance supply and demand. Detailed computational experiments are presented to provide managerial insights into different strategies to schedule reserve duties.

Validation of the patient advocacy engagement scale for health professionals.

Codes of ethics of nursing, social work, and medicine, as well as Joint Commission Accreditation Standards, require members of these professions to engage in advocacy on behalf of patients. With use of expert panels, seven categories of patient problems in the healthcare milieu were identified: ethical rights, quality care, preventive care, culturally competent care, affordable/accessible care, mental health care, and care linked to patients' homes and communities. To measure the frequency with which healthcare professionals engage in patient advocacy related to these specific problems, the Patient Advocacy Engagement Scale (Patient-AES) scale was developed and validated through analysis of responses of 297 professionals (94 social workers, 97 nurses, and 104 medical residents) recruited from the personnel rosters of eight acute-care hospitals in Los Angeles County. Hospitals included public, not-for-profit, HMO, and church-affiliated hospitals that served general hospital populations, veterans, cancer patients, and children. Results supported the validity of both the concept and the instrument. Construct validity was supported by testing the hypothesized seven-factor solution through confirmatory factor analysis; 26 items loaded onto seven components. Pearson correlations for the overall scale and seven subscales in two administrations supported their test-retest stability. Cronbach α ranged from .55 to .94 for the seven subscales and .95 for the overall Patient-AES. The Patient-AES is, to our knowledge, the first scale that measures patient advocacy engagement by healthcare professionals in acute-care settings related to a broad range of specific patient problems. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

New Year's Termination

“Don't put off until tomorrow what you can do today” (Benjamin Franklin). The new year provides us the perfect opportunity to look at your personnel roster and evaluate if you have the right people in the right places. Putting off those difficult personnel decisions and hoping that they resolve themselves is never the best course of action.

A three-stage approach for aircraft line maintenance personnel rostering using MIP, discrete event simulation and DEA

Personnel scheduling problems need to cope with personnel preferences, coverage constraints, legal restrictions, and many other constraints. We present a three-stage methodology that can be used to select personnel rosters. In the first stage we generate multiple personnel rosters with a mathematical programming model. In the second stage, the performance of the rosters regarding a number of service criteria is evaluated through discrete event simulation. In the third stage, a ranking is made using data envelopment analysis. The methodology is tested on a personnel scheduling problem for aircraft line maintenance.

An evolutionary approach for the nurse rerostering problem

The personnel scheduler constructs a deterministic personnel roster that determines the line-of-work for each personnel member. When unexpected events disrupt this roster, the feasibility needs to be restored by constructing a new workable roster. The scheduler must reassign the set of employees in order to cover the disrupted shift such that the staffing requirements and the time-related personnel constraints remain satisfied. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary meta-heuristic to solve the nurse rerostering problem. We show that the proposed procedure performs consistently well under many different circumstances. We test different optimisation strategies and compare our procedure with the existing literature on a dataset that is carefully designed in a controlled and varied way.

Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (review)

Reviewed by: Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period Mark Ravina (bio) Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period. By Mary Elizabeth Berry. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006. xvii, 325 pages. $44.95. This is a sweeping, ambitious, elegant, and accomplished book. Berry's topic is nothing less than print culture in Tokugawa Japan, and her sources range from shogunal personnel rosters and genealogies, through travel [End Page 191] guides to Kyoto, to the fiction of Ihara Saikaku. These different print genres, she argues, helped to create a common sense of national boundaries and national culture among a large, literate stratum of early modern Japanese society. Tokugawa readers shared a sense of where Japan ended, the location of its most important places, which people were important, and what made for a cultured traveler. Although this common print culture was a precursor of modern Japanese national identity, Berry carefully distinguishes the "nationalism" of early modern print culture from its modern variant. The To-kugawa state was vastly more powerful than any medieval polity, but it did not demand exclusive fealty. "While exercising paramount powers of governance, the shogunate established no direct ties with subjects and exacted no paramount loyalty from them" (p. 230). The coherence of the Tokugawa order was thus as much cultural as political. The book is striking in several ways. First is Berry's surefooted and effective use of the first-person and second-person voices. Historians have long debated how or whether to insert themselves into their manuscripts, and the question has received sustained attention with the influence of ethnography and anthropology. Berry does not trumpet the theoretical bases of her approach but simply inserts us into Tokugawa life. She opens her examination of travel literature with a challenge to imagine that "you lived in Kyoto three hundred years ago and were facing your first trip to Edo, the Tokugawa shogun's capital, some 500 kilometers away. To flesh out this fantasy, let's make you a senior clerk in a firm that retails silk cloth. You are being sent on a temporary assignment from that main shop in Kyoto to a branch in Edo" (p. 1). Berry then details what books you might buy in Kyoto to prepare for your journey: an astonishing array of maps and travel guides detailing not only Edo, but the To¯kaido¯. Berry returns to this "you are there approach" later when she explores travel guides to Kyoto. "Several summers ago I traveled across Kyoto following a tour guide written in 1706 by the Confucian polymath Kaibara Ekiken" (p. 185). She takes us along (with Ekiken) to visit the edifying sights of Kyoto. We visit To¯fukuji, Ginkakuji, and Ninnaji—a list of Kyoto highlights still reproduced by Lonely Planet, Fodor's, and countless Japanese-language tour books. Ekiken's guide, Berry shows, was part of the construction of a readily recognizable canon of important cultural sites. But although we can use Ekiken's writings, he was not writing for us. By physically rather than metaphorically using Ekiken as a guide, Berry dramatizes what Ekiken assumed about his readership: they know "dozens of names of emperors, empresses, princes, monks, priests, nuns, military rulers, generals, writers, artists, dancers, tea masters, and scholars . . . aristocratic and clerical titles . . . the ranking system of Zen monasteries, and the vocabulary of religious architecture and iconography" (p. 194). Although Ekiken's guide, Keijo¯ sho¯ran, is in some ways strikingly similar to a modern travel [End Page 192] guide, it made assumptions about cultural literacy specific to early modern print culture. Equally striking is how Berry playfully but powerfully inserts her own life into a discussion of how "maps are strange" (p. 54). Mapping, Berry argues, is innate: even before language acquisition, children show the ability to perceive complex spatial relationships and abstract them into mental diagrams. Yet all such abstractions involve a linguistic code, which must say some things and cannot say others. Highway maps, for example, are useful because conventions such as single lines for local roads and double lines for faster roads give drivers important information quickly. So do medieval Japanese survey maps, which...

Dr Alexander Maclean Mackay: Profile of a China Medical Missionary

Compared to missionaries like Timothy Richard (1845–1919) and Hudson Taylor (1832–1905), Dr Alexander Maclean Mackay is a name almost unknown in the annals of Christian evangelism in China. The personnel roster of the London Missionary Society, to which he initially belonged, did boast of such luminaries as Robert Morrison (1782–1834), a pioneering Protestant preacher in early nineteenth-century China and James Legge (1815–1897), a missionary turned Sinologist and Oxford don. But Mackay, as one of the Mission's numerous field workers, is not likely to be found in such distinguished company. In fact, his sojourn in China, in comparison, was relatively brief. It lasted not quite six years, from January 1891 to September 1896, when he died of cholera and was buried in China. In many ways, he was merely another missionary, one of the many men and women, Catholic and Protestant, who had toiled in China, then faded into oblivion, and have since eluded the eye of the historical researcher.

How the administration grows: A longitudinal study of growth in administration at four universities

Despite numerous speculations regarding the rampant growth of administrative sectors in higher education little concrete research has been generated. The current study takes an objective look at the increase in numbers of administrative personnel at four regional universities in Kentucky during an 11-year period. A tally of the numbers of titles included in university personnel rosters during that time indicates that the growth in numbers of administrators and administrative staff exceeded that of most other indicators of university growth such as numbers of faculty, numbers of students, and numbers of graduates. Suggestions are offered for the causes of the marked growth in administrative sectors. The methodology used in this study could be replicated in other types of institutions.