Inadequate Project Information - Problems with Project-by-Project Decision Making
December 3, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Musings, Project Portfolio Management
Inadequate Project Information - Problems with Project-by-Project Decision Making (#3 in the series Problems with Project-by-Project Decision Making)
By Miley W. Merkhofer
Surveys routinely report that management complains about insufficient information for decision-making. For example, R. G. Cooper reports that a study of product development projects at 300 firms “…revealed major weaknesses in the front-end of projects: weak preliminary market assessments, barely adequate technical assessments, dismal market studies and marketing inputs, and deficient business analyses”. The information that is available is typically scattered across different departments and business units, making it difficult to execute informed decisions about where to invest scarce resources, how to prioritize initiatives and balance project demands. Doing project work competes with time spent developing project data, so too many projects means that insufficient time is devoted to developing better project data.
Miley W. (Lee) Merkhofer, Ph.D., is an author and practitioner in the field of decision analysis who specializes in assisting organizations in implementing project portfolio management. He has served on advisory panels for several government agencies and has received grants and research awards for work in the area. Lee is an editor of the journal Decision Analysis.
Prior to becoming an independent consultant, Lee was a Partner of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, where he founded that organization’s capital allocation and project prioritization business practice. Lee is a founding partner of Folio Technologies LLC, a provider of web-based, project portfolio management software.
Lee received his Ph.D. in engineering economic systems from Stanford University. He is the author of the book Decision Science and Social Risk Management and co-author of the book Risk Assessment Methods..
Additional papers on project portfolio management can be found on Lee’s website, www.prioritysystem.com. E-mail: lmerkhofer@prioritysystem.com.
Related Articles
- Problems with Project-by-Project Decision Making - Too Many Projects
- Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Domains - Prioritization and Decision Making
- Problems of Multicultural Projects
- Project Management - Dealing With Information Overload
- Problems with Project-by-Project Decision Making - Poor Project Performance
No comments yet.
feel free to leave a comment
Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!
XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
All fields marked with " * " are required.










