A multi-criteria project assessment framework for R&D organizations in the IT sector

The project selection is one of the most important problems in Information Technology (IT) organizations. Project evaluation criteria with the assigned weights are used to evaluate, prioritize and select projects. Project evaluation criteria should be aligned with the specific objectives of the organization and accurately reflect the opinion of experts. The purpose of this paper is to present a multi-criteria project assessment framework for Research and Development (R&D) organizations in the IT sector. The paper first generates a two-dimensional project selection framework which consists of project scoring and risk assessment hierarchies. The project scoring hierarchy consists of eight scoring criteria namely, strategic criteria, financial criteria, marketing criteria, technological criteria, human resources criteria, organizational criteria, development process criteria, and environment criteria. The project uncertainties are calculated by threats caused by eight major factors namely, technology factors, financial factors, marketing factors, human resources factors, organizational factors, development process factors, customer/user factors, and outsourcing factors. In this study, the judgments are elicited from 20 experts with using a pair wise comparison matrix and aggregated by taking the geometric mean of the individual judgments. The analytical hierarchical process (AHP) is applied to calculate the relative importance of the each criterion and sub criterion.