A Methodology for Reducing Bench Strength in Information Technology Companies

A Methodology for Reducing Bench Strength in Information Technology Companies

One of the major risks in information technology (IT) project execution is the non-availability of resources with required skill sets to meet the project demands. To mitigate this risk, almost every IT organization maintains a portion of their resources on bench. The bench strength reduces the delay in starting the project due to the nonavailability of skilled resources. But bench strength or buffer is cost to the company. A medium scale Indian IT company incurs around USD 142,347 monthly on maintaining the bench strength. Hence this study is undertaken to develop a methodology to reduce the bench strength in IT companies. The proposed methodology is to obtain an optimum mix of resources from bench and through recruitment to meet the demands at a minimum cost. This is done by formulating the problem as an integer programming problem. The problem aims to minimize the total cost of obtaining the skilled resources without violating the constraints on demand, bench strength availability and recruitment lead time. The problem can be solved using Microsoft excel solver function or any other optimization packages like CPLEX, Gurobi, etc. A case study on the application of proposed methodology is also discussed in the paper. The case study showed that the proposed methodology is superior to the existing practice of maintaining large bench strengths to meet the demands for resources with various skills.