Managing a Portfolio of Product Development Projects under Resource Constraints

Tyson R. Browning, Ali A. Yassine

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    41 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    Managers of product development (PD) project portfolios face difficult decisions in allocating limited resources to minimize project or portfolio delay. Although PD projects are highly iterative (cyclical), almost all of the vast literature on project scheduling assumes that projects are acyclical. This article addresses this gap with a comprehensive analysis of 31 priority rules (PRs) on 18,480 portfolios containing 55,440 iterative projects. We find that the best PRs for iterative project portfolios differ significantly from those for acyclical ones, and that the best PRs at the project level differ from those at the portfolio level. The best PR depends on project and portfolio characteristics such as network density, iteration intensity, resource loading profile, and amount of resource contention. In particular, by amplifying the effects of iteration, high-density networks hold dramatically different implications for iterative projects. Moreover, the best PR also differs depending on whether the objective is to minimize the average delay to all projects or to minimize delay to the overall portfolio. Thus, a project or portfolio manager who uses the same PR on all occasions will exhibit unnecessarily poor performance in most cases.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)333-372
    Number of pages40
    JournalDecision Sciences
    Volume47
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 1 Apr 2016

    Keywords

    • Multiproject scheduling
    • Portfolio management
    • Priority rules
    • Product development
    • Project management
    • Resource constraints

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