Workforce planning--the allocation of human resources to available projects/task units--is a problem that has a direct impact on the financial bottom line of an organization. Whether the organization is a small services company with dozens of people or a large public sector enterprise with dozens of thousands of people, as a relative measure, a significant cost reduction (or increase in profitability) can result from an optimal workforce allocation. However, since reallocation of a person from one project to another is a sensitive decision, there are multiple practical constraints and policy considerations in workforce planning problems.

This interesting work attempts to do workforce planning in the context of public schools in Catalonia, in northeast Spain. According to the text, the authors consider

three main policies that regulate government powers. The first is a short-term policy under which the decision maker cannot dismiss any teachers (permanent or nonpermanent) but can transfer nonpermanent teachers from one school to another, while maintaining the status of permanent teachers in all schools, and the original number of schools. [The second option is a] “middle-term policy [that] grants the government restricted power to dismiss only nonpermanent teachers, but it can transfer permanent teachers between schools and change the original number of them. [The third policy option is a] long-term policy [that] refers to the possibility of dismissing any permanent or nonpermanent teacher from any school.

Not many rigorous papers handle policy decisions, and that is a core strength of this work. While it does not consider the third policy (the long-term policy option), it does present a detailed analysis of the other options and recommends the second policy option. The results of this work “show that overall efficiency can be improved without losing outputs and quality.” Further, it shows that in their specific problem context, “12.7 percent of resources can be saved without changing the current network,” and “17.2 percent of resources [can be saved] if the network composition is changed by resizing the number of schools operating.”

Clearly, these are very strong results. While there may or may not be a political will to execute on the results of this paper, and while more studies may be needed (and justified) to implement the significant workforce changes suggested by this paper, regardless it serves as an exceptional example of operations research with direct impact for the taxpayers.

An obvious extension idea is to use the same model and technique in the private or semi-public sector (for example, a large enterprise such as Telefonica or Siemens) and evaluate the results in that scenario. Considering the higher flexibility offered by the private sector, it may be easier to implement the proposed workforce changes and validate (or invalidate) the model and the technique.