International Construction Specialty Conference of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering (ICSC) (5th : 2015)

State of practice in portfolio management : a comprehensive survey Masoumi, R.; Ashuri, B.; Minchin, R. E.; Shahandashti, M.; Touran, A.

Abstract

There has been an increase in the practice of managing multiple projects as the number of megaprojects has decreased and firms try to manage a larger number of smaller projects. The use of portfolio management is growing in the industry to allow firms to maximize the use of their limited resources. This paper reports on the outcome of a comprehensive survey, which was supported by the Construction Industry Institute (CII) and a team of 17 experts from various firms. The survey focused on identifying contemporary portfolio management practices by asking 28 questions on five topics: firm information, makeup of a portfolio, current practices, performance metrics, and implementation. The survey was designed to give an insight into what successful owners and contractors have done in implementing portfolio management. It was found that owners approach portfolio management differently from contractors. Owners generally establish strategic business objectives and select projects and form their portfolios using their available resources. On the other hand, contractors try to win projects and follow their clients’ regulations; however, they still need portfolio management to efficiently manage their projects. A major emphasis of this research effort was the list of performance metrics used in portfolio management. Owners who successfully implemented portfolio management within their firms have practiced the use of a formal project prioritization system in a portfolio. All of these firms use dashboards with performance metrics to show the performance of a portfolio. The Main indicators found on current dashboards include cost, schedule, safety, and overall success of the portfolio.

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Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada