Project Portfolio Management, selection and scheduling. Bridging the gap between strategy and operations *

Resumen

Corporate strategy can be successfully implemented by means of a portfolio of projects. Project portfolio management has focussed on project valuation, selection and ranking. On the other side, multi-project management literature has been concerned with multi-project scheduling and resource allocation. In this paper, we show that both processes are not independent, as the decision to include a new project into the portfolio not only depends on the financial value or strategic alignment with firm strategy, but also on how the new project interacts with the existing portfolio schedule, risk, capital cost, etc. We show why this happens, stressing the problems and possible solutions. We advocate for distributed approaches to bridge the gap between corporate strategic decisions and operational decisions in projects.