  This paper is based on a case study of an IT organization in a large,
US-based healthcare provider, and develops simluation models to identify areas
for performance improvement. These organizations are often grouped into
departments by technical skill and support both operational work (tickets) and
project work (tasks) of various priorities. From a practical standpoint,
resource managers and staff regularly manage all work as queued and assign /
complete it based on the priorities of the day. Using project and operational
metrics from the case study organization, the hybrid model using both system
dynamics and discrete event simulation developed through this research depicts
the flow of work through a skill-based team as well as many of the key factors
that influence that workflow, both positive and negative. Experience indicates
that the interaction between project and operational work -- as well as between
teams with differing skills -- entangles work queues and wait times within
those queues in a way that rapidly scales in complexity as the number of
interacting individuals and teams increases. Results from model simulation bear
out this intuition. Scaling the models to accommodate multiple teams is a topic
of future research.
