Abstract : Teams have become strategic features in organizations. Research and practice suggest team effectiveness is driven considerably by the mix of team member attributes. Given the impact a team's composition has on its objectives, private industry and military leaders place a premium on making optimal team staffing decisions. Nonetheless, the challenges associated with achieving optimal team composition are significant and indicate a need for a tool/system to help commanders optimize personnel allocation. Accordingly, this report lays the foundation for a system that incorporates the elements required to help leaders optimize team composition. For our first task, leaders with extensive team staffing experience were interviewed to uncover the implicit decision models used by team staffing experts. Supplementing extant research, the interviews contributed to our second task: the development of a team composition decision taxonomy. The taxonomy defines and organizes elements of the team staffing decision domain. The interviews and taxonomy culminated in the development of a generic, customizable team composition optimization algorithm that models team composition-effectiveness relationships. Finally, we designed a framework/methodology for a Team Optimal Profiling System (TOPS) and demonstrated its use for making an optimal team composition decision.