Decision Support System for Team Formation

Team formation is an important but complex process for project success. Many organizations experience difficulties creating effective teams to achieve specific tasks. Variations in skill-sets and personalities in teams can sometimes lead to suboptimal performance, conflict or even failure. For example, two or more team members may not cooperate, or a member may not be committed to the task and be indifferent to the project’s success. It is important that all team members perform well in their assigned tasks and effectively communicate within the whole team. Careful team formation can increase project success rates. This requires some form of personality assessment, such as the Big Five Model. Effectively automating this process can also reduce time requirements. An opportunity exists for the development of a decision support system that utilizes operations research and behavioral science to optimize the performance and cohesiveness of teams selected from a given set of individuals. Daniel Srabotnjak, Darryl Lobo, Eric Li and Hamza Mahmood, a group of fourth year Management Engineering students under the supervision of Dr. Vanessa Bohns, chose to develop a mathematical model that automates team formation for their final design project.