Competence-Driven Project Portfolio Analysis

Traditional project portfolio selection models, implemented in the form of decision support systems, promise to support an enterprise or an organization in the process of selecting a subset of potential projects from a (sometimes large and complex) candidate set. Recently, several approaches have been developed that do not force the decision- maker to explicitly provide his/her preference function in advance, but allow him/her to define multiple criteria for the project selection decision and to interactively explore the set of Pareto-optimal solutions with respect to these criteria, until a satisfactory and feasible project portfolio has been found. Despite the general usefulness of these techniques, they fail to take into account a specific factor that is of crucial importance especially in the field of research and development, namely the factor of competence development. For this reason, we aim at an enriched decision support system for project portfolio selection that extends methodological approaches (partly elaborated in several publications by the applicants) by a proper consideration of aspects of competence development and, thus, adapts available results from basic research to a potential application for the task of project management in innovative areas. To his end, we also try to overcome a second hindrance that often prevents modern project portfolio selection methods from being applied by recognizing that in order to be realistic, computer-supported approaches have to take notice of the fact that portfolio decisions are always made under uncertainty. Thus, our proposal suggests a system encompassing stochastic multicriteria decision analysis in a project portfolio selection context. Computationally, this is done by applying modern multiobjective optimization metaheuristics in a suitable combination with simulation. To test our approach in a real-life scenario, we plan to apply a prototype of the intended decision support system to the project selection process of a public-private-partnership institution in the area of research and development. We plan to have the test of our system accompanied by a socioeconomic cross- evaluation, taking account of the responses of the involved personnel and analyzing them from a sociological perspective.