Prioritising IT projects: A multi-method approach

Effective project evaluation and selection has proven to have a direct and significant influence on organizations’ productivity and profitability. Therefore, researchers have been eagerly working on project selection mechanisms since mid-20th century, resulting in development of a plenitude of methods. However, most of prior studies are focused on proposing techniques for prioritising the projects based on a given set of selection criteria, with no or little emphasis on how such criteria themselves should be identified and prioritised in the first place, especially in situations where a large number of selection criteria is involved (which is today ubiquitous). This paper attempts to address this gap by combining fuzzy Quality Function Development with five Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods. Five MCDM techniques are used and the results are aggregated to increase the robustness of our hybrid approach. The proposed approach is then applied in a numerical example from a real word IT organisation to illustrate the applicability and usefulness of the proposed methodology.