Department of Engineering Physics and Mathematics

The objective of this Thesis is to examine the evaluation of single research and development (R&D) project and the management of R&D project portfolio. A challenge the R&D organizations have faced is that there are more new ideas for R&D projects than the organization has money and resources to implement. At this situation the R&D organization must develop its project portfolio management in order to find the projects supporting each other's strengths, compensating each other's weaknesses and complying organizations predetermined strategy. Qualitative and quantitative information is combined to evaluate the value of a R&D project. The decision makers use project's compliance with strategy, novelty value, market potential, partners in cooperation and research group's competences as criteria to either accept or reject the project proposal. With the use of these decision criteria, the objective is to make the decision process more transparent and more efficient. Mathematical decision support tools are applied to diminish the amount of time needed to make decisions and to focus the discussion on the relevant matters. The decision support tools do not make the decisions for the decision makers, they are only used to support the process. The results of this study can be divided into three parts. Firstly, it was noted that the evaluation of project proposal regarding the predetermined decision criteria would increase the consistency and coherency of decision making. However, the decision makers have doubts about evaluating the project proposals numerically. They fear that the numerical evaluations are misinterpreted without the right context. Secondly, it was discovered that the best way to improve the project portfolio's compliance with strategy was to increase the discussion about new project ideas between the researchers and decision makers. As the decision makers are able to steer the new project proposals at their planning stage, the objectives of the project can be determined to better comply with the strategy. Thirdly, with small changes to the decision process, we were able to integrate a mathematical decision support system to be a part of it. This decision support system creates a summary of the decision makers' opinions. The summary can be used as a basis for the conversation between decision makers. This helps the decision makers to focus the discussion on the relevant project proposals.