Telecommunication projects portfolio scheduling using the IFM approach

Project management methodologies are geared towards managing individual projects. However, modern project-oriented firms execute more than one project at a time. This is a common characteristic in the service sector, like telecommunication companies, which run a bundle of projects concurrently. Hence, project scheduling gradually becomes project portfolio scheduling. It must be underlined that projects within a given portfolio are usually interconnected with relationships and dependencies and share common resources. Maximizing the overall value generated from project completion and operation is a main objective in portfolio scheduling. A modification of the IFM approach is used in order to confront this scheduling problem. A set of problem instances is generated in order to instigate a comparison study. The obtained results are quite promising and the method seems to scale well regarding the size of the project portfolio.