On Business Optimization

Teaching and Learning Project Portfolio Management: What's Your Experience?

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I’ve also been toying for the last several years with the idea of developing a turn-key module for senior undergraduates or graduate business students in project portfolio management and/or decision analysis using Optsee®. It would be similar to an assignment I had at Wharton in an R&D Management class taught by Professor Earnest Gilmont, except that we didn't use any software or decision analysis tools. 

Each student would get a copy of Optsee® that is pre-loaded with an unoptimized portfolio of projects with pre-assigned attributes (such as rewards, costs, resources, risks, etc.) and sets of constraints created for a hypothetical company. The students would form teams, and each team would be assigned to take their set of projects and develop an optimized portfolio that was targeted for different strategic goals. For example:

• one team would develop a portfolio designed to make the company attractive for being acquired
• one team would develop a portfolio designed for implementing an outsourcing strategy
• one team would develop a portfolio to maximize short-term gain
• one team would develop a portfolio to maximize long-term sustainability

Each team would then put together a presentation and/or a paper presenting their portfolio and how they came to agree on it. This would require the team to agree on what attributes to use, the shapes of the attribute curves, the attribute weights, and what constraints they would need to apply.

I think that this could all be put into a nice educational package that would give students an excellent understanding of developing strategic project portfolios based on business goals through their own experiences and by seeing the different portfolios developed by their classmates. It would also give them a fundamental  understanding and appreciation of multi-criteria or multiattribute decision analysis, prioritization using Monte Carlo simulations, and optimization against multiple constraints. 

So I am curious. How did you learn about Project Portfolio Management? And if you're a professor, how do you teach it?