The objective of the work described in this paper is to optimally assign projects or tasks to people in order to best utilize their expertise and minimize outside R&D contract, dollars spent in any given period of time. This capability is important to several globally leveraged groups within Dow AgroSciences that perform standardized activities to fulfill product development requirements. Both math programming and heuristic-based approaches are used to solve this problem. The heuristic allows for quick generation of solutions, while the math program is more rigorous but very time-consuming. This paper discusses the effort required to collect the data, formulate the math program, develop the heuristic and interpret the results.