A methodology for the strategic staff planning in public universities
- Autores: María del Rocío de la Torre Martínez
- Directores de la Tesis: Manuel Mateo Doll (dir. tes.), Amaia Lusa García (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) ( España ) en 2015
- Idioma: inglés
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Martí Casadesús Fa (presid.), Albert Corominas Subias (secret.), Josefa Mula Bru (voc.)
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
- Resumen
The number of public universities worldwide has been increased substantially in the last decades. In Europe, such growth has been accompanied of several regulatory changes in regard of different aspects such as: the Bologna process, the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS), new mechanisms for resource management, growing interests in patents and entrepreneurship and the increasing emphasis on university-industry relationship, among others. Accordingly, universities should adopt new management strategies; otherwise, they would face problems around weak financing, personnel management (from both academics and administration departments) and treatment of talent, amongst others. The strategic staff planning consists in determining the long term quantity and type of required resources according to a set of restrictions (e.g. personnel, academic and economic policies). The lack of a strategic planning, could be translated into an increment in personnel costs, an inadequate determination of workforce size to the actual university needs, and an inadequate workforce composition in regard of various aspects such as: the generational renewal, experience, expertise in diverse knowledge fields and an adequate balance between teaching and research profiles. The determination of a methodology, which includes the mathematical modeling by means of a Mixed Integer Linear Program, for the strategic planning of public universities, is the main object of the present thesis. The optimization of the strategic planning addresses various aspects such as: i) policies on personnel hiring, firing and promotion; ii) workforce heterogeneity (set of categories); iii) and the adoption of an optimization criterion, in this case based not only on economics, but also on other aspects such as the required service level and the achievement of a workforce composition according to a preferable one. The optimization model, and the corresponding analyses in regard of diverse study cases on different personnel, academic and economic policies, are the main contributions of the present thesis. The contents of the thesis are divided into 7 principal chapters. Chapter 2 offers a state of the art on knowledge intensive organizations (KIOs) and the strategic capacity planning, also particularizing for the case of universities. Next, Chapter 3 identifies the most relevant characteristics of KIOs in general, and of universities in particular. This chapter gives rise to the development of a methodology for the determination of the strategic staff planning, which is stated in Chapter 4. This methodology consists of different phases, each one treated in the following chapters: the characterization of the problem (Chapter 5), the mathematical formulation of the optimization model for the strategic planning (Chapter 6) and the evaluation of the optimization model in different study cases (Chapter 7). Finally, the conclusions of the previously mentioned analyses and the potentiality of the proposed tools are summarized in Chapter 8. The main conclusions of the thesis indicate, among others, that the proposed optimization model successes in obtaining a close composition to a preferable one taking into account constraints associated to budget and required service level, as well as others affecting personnel (hiring, firing and promotions) and academic policies. In this sense, the model contributes to decision making processes on strategic staff planning, thus facilitating the sustainable development of public universities
