Capacity planning for human resources in the software industry

Abstract

The software industry in India has witnessed tremendous growth in the past few years and is poised to become the industry of the new millennium for the country. With manpower or intellectual capital being the main driver of this industry, it is imperative that the companies take proactive measures to harness, retain, train and deploy these human resources in the most productive manner possible. Currently, the importance of human resource capacity utilization has been sidelined because of the high revenues/margins involved. With margins running high, the hidden costs of wasted manpower capacity are not apparent on the bottomlines of the companies. But as the industry structure changes, competition from other low cost third-world nations intensifies and growth stabilizes, it will be essential for Indian companies to treat the manpower utilization problem with top priority and streamline their existing manpower planning procedures to remain competitive and maintain their profitability. This paper attempts to build a comprehensive framework for resporce planning for software firm. The proposed ramework is then used to develop a quantitative model which can be used as a a decision support system to aid recruitment and training in a software company.