How do you give every team a fair share of every skill?
Forming teams by hand always ends the same way. One team quietly collects all the engineers and another gets none, and nobody can explain the logic when someone asks. This template turns the split into an optimization problem with a floor for every skill on every team, and at the default roster it proves that one team has to come up short, then tells you by exactly how much.
Work Advanced Optimization free
After you install, this is the model to open.
Balanced Team Builder
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
The answer
One click on Run, and the objective drops from 2 unfilled technical seats to 1, which is the best any split can do.
- Unfilled technical seats
- 1 down from 2 in the hand split
- Weakest team
- 1 technical person, up from 0
- Technical people
- 7 for the 8 seats four teams need
- Balanced splits found
- 1,936 of 12,880 that clear the other floors
The hand split leaves one team with no technical people at all. The optimizer fixes that, but only just: the best possible split is still one seat short, because 7 technical people cannot cover four teams that each need 2. Every other floor holds on every team, so 19 of the 20 team-by-skill checks pass. The useful answer is not a cleverer shuffle, it is one more technical person on the roster.
The model
A 28-person roster is grouped into five skill profiles, and the optimizer decides how many seats of each profile land on each of the four teams.
| Roster | 28 people in 5 profiles |
| Teams | 4 teams of 7 |
| Technical build | 7 on the roster, floor of 2 per team |
| Data and analytics | 15 on the roster, floor of 3 per team |
| Client-facing | 21 on the roster, floor of 4 per team |
| Senior (5 or more years) | 18 on the roster, floor of 4 per team |
| Operations | 13 on the roster, floor of 3 per team |
| Starting split | a hand split, 2 technical seats short |
| Cells Sortia may change | 24 (20 seat counts + 4 slack) |
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
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Every model like this one, and the method behind them: Optimization in Google Sheets.