A Decision Support Model for Project Assignments

Peerasit Patanakul

ABSTRACT
The assignment of projects to project managers is one of the most important decisions associated with project management. This is because inappropriate assignment—e.g., assigning too many projects to project managers— may reduce project manager performance, resulting in problems such as project delay or budget overrun. These problems are likely to negatively affect the organizational performance.

Despite the importance of the project assignment process, research on project assignment methodology is limited and provides only limited evidence regarding the question of how to effectively assign projects to project managers. This study advances the literature and directly answers this question. Case study research methodology in conjunction with a panel of experts is used to develop an integrated list of project assignment criteria. The criteria include organizational factors, project requirements, competencies of project managers, and organizational constraints. The criteria are then used to develop a decision support model (DSM) for project assignments. The DSM is based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), competency matrices, and integer programming (IP). For validation purposes, the DSM was applied to a specific company to assign project managers to product development projects.

The most significant contributions of this research include: 1) a DSM that addresses the assignment problem in a manner that is clearer, more explicit and systematic than similar models in the extant literature, 2) an integrated list of project assignment criteria that extends the work of other researchers, 3) a list of competencies that project managers who lead multiple simultaneous projects must possess.

Thursday, May 27, 2004
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Dragan Milosevic, Chair
Tim Anderson
Dundar Kocaoglu
Wayne W. Wakeland
Robert Eder, Graduate Studies Rep.