فریبرز رحیم نیا

INTRODUCTION: Iran has long been recognized as one of the most accident-prone areas in the world due to its special geographical location. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to devote special attention to crisis management in organizations and the identification of related strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. METHODS: The present study aimed to identify the strategic positioning of crisis management after natural disasters at the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad as the center of excellence in the east of the country. To this end, the internal and external factors which militate against university crisis management were identified. Thereafter, the strategic positioning of this university was determined among four positions, namely offensive, defensive, adaptive, and contingency, using a combination of SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis, analytic hierarchy process (AHP), and Monte Carlo simulation, and strategies were presented. The statistical population were university facility experts and managers among whom 10 cases were selected by purposive sampling. FINDINGS: Based on the obtained results, the highest weights in different sub-criteria were as follows: compliance with the required technical and safety standards in new constructions of the university campus (strength), the absence of any specific plan for dealing with various types of crises in different buildings (weakness), the proximity of the fire station to the university campus (opportunity), and indecisiveness of organizations supervising building retrofitting, including provincial government and Roads and Urban Development Office (threat). CONCLUSION: The results of the present study demonstrated that strategic positioning can be identified by analyzing internal and external factors. Moreover, among the four strategic positions, it was found that the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad adopted an offensive crisis management strategy in 45.4% of the cases.

As a vital practice in human resources management, workforce planning determines that the organization is needed how many workforces, when, and which position. Workforce planning is not formed in a vacuity, and job variables such as skill, ability, and knowledge affect the planning. This study examines workforce planning in the health sector concerning the workforce's flows such as recruitment, promotion, degradation, fired, retention, and termination of the contract according to the skill audit and the role of performance appraisal results in this program. For this purpose, a dynamic model has been applied that can provide optimal answers to the number of workforces required and the workforce's flows at any time during the planning periods. This model has been implemented in a hospital ward with two levels of hierarchy: nurses, supervisors, and nursing directors. The results show that the designed system can converge the existing values to the optimal values by noting delays by the optimal control model.