PPM-HC: a Method for Helping Project Portfolio Management Based on Topic Hierarchy Learning

Abstract

The projects categorisation is a crucial step in the project portfolio management (PPM). Categorising projects allows the organisation to identify categories with a lack or excess of projects, according to its strategic objectives. In this work, we present a new method for project portfolio management based on hierarchical clustering (PPM-HC) to organise the projects at several levels of abstraction. In the PPM-HC, similar projects are allocated to the same clusters and subclusters. PPM-HC automatically learns an understandable topic hierarchy from the project portfolio dataset, thereby facilitating the (human) task of exploring, analysing and prioritising the projects of the organisation. We also proposed a card sorting-based technique which allows the evaluation of the projects categorisation using an intuitive visual map. We carried out an experimental evaluation based on a benchmark dataset and we also presented a real-world case study. The results show that the proposed PPM-HC method is promising.