Decision-Making over the Project Life Cycle: An Analytical Hierarchy Approach

Abstract

Modern project management decisions are made in an environment often characterized by complexity, need for flexibility, and inclusion of a decision-maker's subjectivity. Typical project management, private or public, involves making decisions on the allocation of resources, project selection, choice of project managers, bid evaluation, vendor selection, and so forth, in an efficient and timely manner. In this paper, we illustrate how these kinds of decisions can be analyzed via a powerful research-based, multicriteria decision-making technique, the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). Using AHP, the decision problems are delineated into hierarchies in the form of goals, criteria, and alternatives for pairwise comparisons using Expert Choice® software. The judgments are further synthesized to provide ranking of the alternatives for the best choice.