Portfolio Selection: Assessment of a Framework

Decision-making often involves selecting a portfolio of alternatives, rather than a single option. For example, in assembling an IS project team, rather than picking one best” employee, multiple employees are selected based on various skills to fill different positions. The value of the employees depending not only on their individual competency skills, but also on how well they work as a team. The team synergy is important, and the value of the portfolio (i.e. IS project team in this case) is different from the sum of the values of the individual team members. Though many studies have been published on portfolio selection in diverse contexts, most of these studies tend to focus on specific problem environments and cannot easily be generalized. This paper assesses and enhances a previously published, general framework for portfolio decisions with respect to its usefulness in classifying and understanding decision problems

PB-ADVISOR: A private banking multi-investment porfolio.

Private banking is a business area in which the investor requires tailor-made advice. Because of the current market situation, investors are requiring answers to difficult questions and looking for assurance from wealth managers. Private bankers need to have deep knowledge about an innumerable list of products and their characteristics as well as the suitability of each product for the client’s characteristics to be able to offer an optimal portfolio according to client expectations. Client and portfolio diversity calls for new recommendation and advice systems focused on their specific characteristics. This paper presents PB-ADVISOR, a system aimed at recommending investment portfolios based on fuzzy and semantic technologies to private bankers. The proposed system provides private bankers with a powerful tool to support their decision process and help deal with complex investment portfolios. The system has been evaluated in a real scenario obtaining promising results

The use of search-based optimization techniques to schedule and staff software projects: an approach and an empirical study

Allocating resources to a software project and assigning tasks to teams constitute crucial activities that affect project cost and completion time. Finding a solution for such a problem is NP-hard; this requires managers to be supported by proper tools in performing such an allocation. This paper shows how search-based optimization techniques can be combined with a queuing simulation model to address these problems. The obtained staff and task allocations aim to minimize the completion time and reduce schedule fragmentation. The proposed approach allows project managers to run multiple simulations, compare results and consider trade-offs between increasing the staffing level and anticipating the project completion date and between reducing the fragmentation and accepting project delays. The paper presents results from the application of the proposed search-based project planning approach to data obtained from two large scale commercial software maintenance projects

A multicriteria decision support system for competence-driven project portfolio selection

Stummer C, Kiesling E, Gutjahr WJ. A multicriteria decision support system for competence-driven project portfolio selection. International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making. 2009;8(02):379-401

Methods to Support the Project Selection Problem With Non-Linear Portfolio Objectives, Time Sensitive Objectives, Time Sensitive Resource Constraints, and Modeling Inadequacies

The United States Air Force relies upon information production activities to gain insight regarding uncertainties affecting important system configuration and in-mission task execution decisions. Constrained resources that prevent the fulfillment of every information production request, multiple information requestors holding different temporal-sensitive objectives, non-constant marginal value preferences, and information-product aging factors that affect the value-of-information complicate the management of these activities. This dissertation reviews project selection research related to these issues and presents novel methods to address these complications. Quantitative experimentation results demonstrate these methods’ significance

A MULTICRITERIA DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR COMPETENCE-DRIVEN PROJECT PORTFOLIO SELECTION

The systematic and proactive development of human resources is of major importance in organizations that rely heavily on the competencies of their employees when engaging in innovative endeavors. Human capital, however, is not only a resource required for conducting research, but also the eventual result of that research. When selecting a research portfolio, the decision-maker (DM) thus needs to take into consideration both current and future competence requirements, as well as other financial and nonfinancial objectives and constraints. We introduce a proper multicriteria decision support system (MCDSS) that first determines the set of Pareto-efficient solutions and then allows the DM to interactively filter and/or explore this set in various ways. Its practical application is demonstrated by means of a showcase at the Electronic Commerce Competence Center (EC3) in Vienna, Austria.Multicriteria decision support system, interactive decision analysis, project portfolio selection, competence development, visual interfaces, interactive navigation