Program planning under uncertainty

Task durations are subject to uncertainty and they can be influenced by the resources assigned. Commonly there is the opportunity to assign workers to tasks, which require a secondary skill they have. When workers use secondary skills, they are not as efficient as workers for which that skill is their primary skill, however they can contribute to the completion of the task. This paper provides the means for managers to heuristically optimize the allocation of their skilled workers among individual tasks on several competing projects when the task durations are uncertain and workers have multiple skills.