A consulting firm uses constraint programming to plan personnel-review meetings

A medium-sized consulting firm uses constraint programming to plan its annual meetings of groups of partners to conduct personnel review of its consultant employees. Key constraints include discussing every knowledgeable partner–consultant relationship in at least one meeting; keeping meetings manageable by limiting the number of partners attending and the number of consultants discussed; restricting the number of meetings each partner attends; and requiring the partners who attend each meeting to represent multiple practice areas. Our objective is to minimize the number of situations in which a consultant who is discussed at a meeting has only one knowledgeable partner attending the meeting. Running the model has saved partners from attending meetings unnecessarily and reduced the time required to develop a meeting plan from a few days to a few hours. It has been part of the review-planning process for the past two and a half years.