A Model for IT/IS Project Portfolio Selection in the Presence of Uncertainty: Combination of Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making and Fuzzy Mathematical Programming

Abstract

IT/IS represents a substantial financial investment for many organizations. Making IT project portfolio decision is difficult, because long lead times of IT project and market and technology dynamics lead to unavailable and unreliable collected data for portfolio management. This uncertainty has been modeled using fuzzy concepts. We need a collective model that will help decision-makers evaluate potential new investment projects in an easy, cost-effective, and collective manner. Hence, we propose a new approach based on the fuzzy multi-criteria decision model (FMCDM) and a fuzzy binary multi-objective linear programming model, featuring a 2-stage evaluation and selection process with 19 criteria for IT/IS investment. At the first stage, evaluation, all stakeholders in a corporation can decide the relative weights they give to the criteria when they evaluate a new IT/IS project by using linguistic values. Experts can also use linguistic values to evaluate all candidates easily. Only an Excel worksheet is needed to obtain an evaluation result. The results of FMCDM of the aforementioned are treated as input of a fuzzy binary mathematical programming model as coefficients of objective functions, which is the second stage of the proposed model. In the second stage, selection, we have developed a fuzzy binary mathematical programming model in order to find an optimum combination of investment portfolio considering a multi-objective measurement function in three ways: to maximize the benefit, to maximize the confidence level and to minimize the cost of projects in a complete ambiguous condition, when their initial investment costs, profits, confidence levels, resource requirements and total available budgets are assumed to be uncertain. We solve it in Lingo 10.0 through a Branch and Bound algorithm. In this paper, for the first time we have developed a model for IT/IS project portfolio selection in presence of uncertainty that is combination of fuzzy multi-criteria decision making and fuzzy mathematical programming with 19 criteria that is compatible with the nature of IT projects. We conduct a case study to show how this model can be used and discuss the results.