iDEA Project Evaluation

Project evaluation problem for organizations is a decision-making effort. Members of the Project Management Office - PMO deal with the follow question "which is more important to assign priority to project, program or portfolio?. Firms are required to taking in consideration financial, operation and resource availability indicators.

Metrics or feedbacks from project managers are not a guarantee of success. New techniques and approach like data envelopment analysis (DEA) and balanced scorecard (BSC) are trying to help managers to solve the questions "what kind of projects or/and portfolio needs to be freeze, hold or kill?" or "which project is under the efficiency frontier and which project is required to acquire better performance with inputs supplied?

The use of methodology based on use of portfolio management and BSC metric determination to set restrictions, inputs, and outputs on DEA models can develop a model that treats data of inputs and outputs in accordance with scorecards definition.

First, the aggregation of projects and their inputs and outputs is required. Second, evaluate the scores and relative efficiency. This framework may find proper subset of projects that reflects better decisions when evaluating risks, resource allocation, costs, and quality.

A case study with semiconductor projects evaluated nineteen projects using DEA-VRS input oriented model. The scorecards for projects points at delivery precision, design revisions, cycle time, development cost were used as outputs. Unplanned feature and schedule conformance were the inputs. The results of the integrated model showed twelve, from nineteen, efficient projects.

DEA innovate in terms of project efficiency evaluation. An important point is that the approach doesn't focus on the application subject's areas but in indicators of performance for every project configured in a DEA model as Decision Maker Unit.