DECISIONS FOR BUSINESS VALUE
Choose the projects that deserve your resources.
Structured, research-based methods for project selection and portfolio prioritization in complex industrial organizations.
PhD, Management Science · PMP · PMI-ACP · Six Sigma Black Belt · 18+ years in automotive and industrial engineering
Your organization does not have too few projects. It has too many.
Every function arrives with a business case. Every business case says "strategic." Resources are finite, the criteria are not comparable, and the initiative that gets funded is too often the one with the most senior sponsor in the room.
Incomparable business cases
Each one built on its own assumptions, discount rate and definition of value.
Everything is strategic
When every initiative claims strategic alignment, the term stops carrying information.
Prioritization that resets
A ranking agreed in Q1 that nobody can reconstruct or defend by Q3.
No way to stop
Projects are approved through a gate process. They are almost never killed by one.
Portfolio decisions should not depend on the loudest voice in the room.
Decision science has spent decades on exactly this problem: how to choose rationally between options measured in different units and argued for by people with different interests. Analytic Hierarchy Process. Weighted multi-criteria scoring. Business value modelling. Portfolio balancing under resource constraints.
What I do here is turn those methods into something an industrial portfolio review can use: explicit criteria, comparable evaluations, and decisions that can be reconstructed and defended. That is what this site is for.
01
Define criteria before you see the projects
Agree what makes a project worth funding while nobody is yet defending a specific one.
02
Evaluate on a comparable basis
Translate strategic fit, financial return and operational risk into one explicit decision model, instead of an informal negotiation between people who each measure value differently.
03
Decide, and be able to defend it
Produce a ranking you can put in front of a steering committee and explain line by line.
Start with the AHP Project Prioritization Tool
A working Excel model that turns an argument about priorities into a ranked, defensible list. Built on the Analytic Hierarchy Process, designed for industrial portfolio reviews.
Pairwise comparison matrix with automatic consistency check
Weighted criteria you define yourself
Ranked output ready to drop into a gate review deck
A short guide explaining the method behind it
Free. Plus one useful email a month. Unsubscribe anytime.
How to compare projects that are not comparable
Long-form articles on selection, prioritization and business value in industrial project portfolios.
Using IRACIS to Compare the Business Value of Projects
11 min read
How to Make Complex Decisions With AHP
14 min read
How to Measure the Business Value of a Project
9 min read
Why take my word for it
I hold a PhD in Management Science. I have spent eighteen years leading projects and programs in industrial engineering, in OEM and Tier-1 environments where the resource constraint is real and the sponsor is usually sitting in the room.
That combination is what this site is built on. Everything published here traces back to one of three things: research I can point you to, a decision method I can show you, or an observation from experience that I label as exactly that.
Maturity mattered most of the three
Of the three determinants tested, project maturity had by far the largest single effect on value decline.
Planning carried the largest losses
Value erosion concentrated in planning processes. Initiating and closing produced the smallest losses.
One thing done properly may beat three done partly
Interactions between the determinants mattered less than the determinants individually.
More process was not automatically better
Among the eight cases, the enterprises with the least value erosion used roughly three quarters of the PMBOK process set. Process quantity and quality were not studied directly, so this is an exploratory observation, not an optimum.
Findings from eight case studies of industrial enterprises in automotive component manufacturing. The dissertation is available on request.
One idea a month on portfolio decisions
No schedule padding, no roundups. A single method, failure pattern or decision framework, explained properly.
The fastest way to reach me is LinkedIn. If you have a question about a method, tool or portfolio decision, send me a message there.