Engineering Project Complexity Measurement And Project Portfolio Management

With the increasing development of the economy,the engineering project is becoming larger in scale,having more stakeholders and getting higher technical requirements.Although we already have a complete management process for engineering projects,in practice we still face the problems such as duration delay,cost overrun,poor communication and so on.The root cause of these problems is that the complexity affects risk,schedule and communication in engineering projects.It is urgent to find new views and methods related to the complexity,because the traditional project management theory and methods seem to be stretched.Complexity theory,applied in many fields,comes from the diversity,relevance,dynamics and uncertainty of the system.As one of complex systems,engineering project has difficulty in its complexity measure based on the manager’s awareness.Measuring the complexity in engineering projects is critical to project complexity management,performance improvement and decisions-making.According to literature review,the research of complexity measurement and management are still in the relatively early stage.Based on the measurement of complexity in engineering projects,this thesis thus proposes the methods and models of project management and project portfolio management.Firstly,in order to manage projects under complexity theory,this thesis proposes a complexity measurement framework for engineering project and project portfolio management based on literature review.Including identification of project complexity source factors,measurement of project complexity and project portfolio selection.This thesis stresses the role of stakeholders in the project management process.Then,according to the concept and source factors of the complexity in engineering projects,this thesis compares the advantages and disadvantages of the exiting measurement methods.It is analyzed in this thesis that there are interrelationships between these factors.Then it proposes a complexity measurement model for engineering projects based on data envelopment analysis,and improves this model by network analytic process.The results show that the complexity of engineering projects comes from interdependent five dimensions,such as organization,technology,goal,environment and information.These complexity source factors interact with each other and form complexity in engineering projects.The received scores of complexity help decision makers understand complexity,overcome the negative impact of complexity and attention to different dimensions of the complexity.source factors.Finally,it is discussed in this thesis that the engineering project portfolio selection based on complexity scores.A number of constraints based on complexity are proposed,and the complex correlations of resources,benefits and results between projects are also defined.So it gives a model of engineering project portfolio selection based on genetic algorithm.Based on the received complexity scores,the last model solves the problem of project portfolio selection with genetic algorithm.It not only helps the decision makers to allocate resources rationally and achieve maximum benefits of the portfolio,but also helps managers realize the goal of control project portfolio by complexity preference.