No abstract

The paramount importance of project portfolios for business drives managers to search for highly efficient support tools to overcome complex challenges of their management. A major tradeoff is to acquire tools able to produce a convenient portfolio project prioritization process, on which business investments are decided. However, by using existing Project Portfolio Management Systems (PPMS), many concurrent projects in a portfolio are usually prioritized and planned in the upstream life-cycle phases according to financial criteria, and overlooking the portfolio alignment to enterprise strategies and the availability of resources, although their importance. In this paper, we propose a conceptual formalization of PPMS with respect to a double portfolio prioritization process that performs two levels of selections according to both: i.) Strategy alignment, including returns on investment, size, and total cost; and ii.) Execution capability, as the organization should be able to manage and deliver the selected projects' outcomes. The advantage of our PPMS framework is twofold. First, it is useful to be customized by designers to fit organization needs. Second it is built with respect to the double prioritization phase process, as an end-to-end process that guarantees optimal portfolios generation. Further, the proposed PPMS system and its identified functionalities are validated through an implementation of a prototype tool.

No abstract

Nowadays, managing and allocating resources to the project portfolio is one of the most critical decision-making processes in projectoriented organizations. To achieve the most value in terms of profitability, these companies should consider taking advantage of ongoing projects and optimal management of their resources allocated to the most optimal project portfolio. Project Portfolio Selection (PPS) and resource allocation are critical problems in project portfolio based companies. These organizations are required to evaluate, prioritize and select their projects in accordance with the strategic and operational mission and objectives. In this study, we propose a three-stage hybrid approach for prioritizing and selecting an optimal project portfolio. We obtain the maximum economic contribution (maximum fitness) between the final PPS and the projects initial prioritizing while considering various organizational criteria and objectives. The proposed approach is composed of three stages with several steps. We use information entropy for the initial prioritizing, the branch and bound algorithm for generating combination of project portfolios and Integer Linear Programming (ILP) for selecting the most suitable project portfolio according to strategic and operational objectives. At the end, a case study is used to demonstrate the applicability and the merits of the proposed approach.