My Doctoral Dissertation

A Multidimensional and Visual Exploration Approach to Project Portfolio Management

(Updated in May 2008) 

Abstract

Managing projects in an organization, especially a project-oriented organization, is a challenging task. There is a large amount of and complex project information to be managed. It is different from managing a single project in that one needs to integrate and synthesize information from multiple projects and multiple perspectives for high level strategic business decisions, such as business objective alignment, resource allocation, and balanced investment and expected return. It is popular to have a portfolio approach to manage these projects, but some of these activities and decisions are still weakly supported by current project portfolio management (PPM) tools. In this dissertation, I propose to develop and refine a multidimensional information analysis and visualization approach to provide better decision support for several PPM tasks. The research will follow a common design science research methodology involving phases of awareness of problem, suggestion, development, evaluation and conclusion. The project is expected to bring a new perspective and create a new tool for project portfolio management. It also contributes to new solutions and new knowledge of managing portfolio and multidimensional information in many business activities.

Key words

Project portfolio management, multidimensional information, clustering, self-organizing map, information visualization, exploratory data analysis, visual data mining

Topic hierarchy

(Gordon Davis, "Writing the Doctoral Dissertation", 1997, pp.39)

Dissertation committee

Dr. Vijay Vaishnavi (Chair), Dr. Dan Robey, Dr. William Robinson, Dr. Stacie Petter

Progress and related work