Resource Analysis in Project Portfolio Management

Project portfolio management is an ongoing task in enterprises and systematic methodologies are being developed for this important task to replace ad hoc approaches of the past. Management of project portfolios differs significantly from the same task applied to financial portfolios. Areas of research like real options seek to exploit the similarities in these two domains and address the differences. One of the unique dimensions in project portfolio management is the role of resources (human). Projects are typically proposed with significant uncertainty and lack of specificity in their resource needs. The evaluation of project portfolio options needs to factor in this uncertainty and also handle the heterogeneity in terms of resource types. Evaluation of the resource impact also needs to consider the tradeoff between maximally utilizing the available resources and having cohesive and compact teams to perform the linked (or related) tasks in a project. In this paper we develop models and methods for analyses of the resource dimension in project portfolio management that address its unique characteristics. We then illustrate our methods with experimental results on synthetic examples with varying characteristics.