A decision-making framework for project portfolio planning at Intel Corporation

The work we describe addresses the problem of deciding between project-funding opportunities under budget and headcount constraints. Although the projects lead to products that yield revenue in the market, complex interactions between the projects and products make the selection of a portfolio difficult. Furthermore, the senior managers in the company have a wealth of business intuition that can inform the required decisions. We combine modeling, simulation, and optimization techniques to provide a set of the best portfolios possible from the proposed projects and resulting products. We also provide a rich set of analysis and visualization tools for the decision makers to use in exploring the suggested portfolios and applying their intuition to make the final selection. The resulting interplay between analytics and intuition produces better business solutions through a more focused and effective debate in a shorter time than previously achieved.