CATEGORIZING PROJECTS: IDENTIFYING DIFFERENCES THAT MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN SELECTING AND RESOURCING PROJECTS

摘要

We present the results of research into project categorization systems. Any organization that undertakes a large number of projects needs ways of describing the projects within its portfolio. There are two main reasons why organizations need to be able to categorize its projects. The first is to develop and assign appropriate competencies to undertake projects successfully (to do them right). The second is to prioritize the projects within an investment portfolio to maximize return on investment (to do the right projects). Prior research in the project management literature has to focus on the first purpose, and in the program and portfolio management literature on the second. In undertaking our research we conducted focus groups, asking practitioners how they used project categorization systems, followed by a web-based questionnaire to test the results from the focus groups. Based on the results from those two research instruments we developed a model for a categorization system for projects, which we validated with our focus groups. In this paper we describe the results of our research, describe the project categorization model we developed.