Project, programme & portfolio management

Most (if not all) companies use projects as a way of organising temporary and unique activities. You may be engaged in developing novel products, services, IT systems, processes, etc. for your own organisation; but you may also be conducting projects for your customers and/or the general public (e.g. IT development, engineering projects, building projects, consulting projects, development projects, etc.)

Treating a task as a project allows you to draw boundaries around the endeavour and to create room for appropriating the required resources, time and management attention for it. Project management principles and methodologies can help you and your organisation keep these endeavours under control in terms of delivering on time, within budget and to specified quality.

As most organisations practice project management, issues like scheduling complex projects, managing programmes (the coordinated management of interrelated projects) and governing project portfolios (investment life-cycle management over multiple projects) are challenging practitioners and researchers.

Many questions are often heard and remain challenging: How to find a balance between creating standardisation and plans and the need to remain flexible and agile? What kinds of skills, tools, organizational structures, systems and processes must you and your organisation master to be able to tackle these issues head on? How to optimise planning and scheduling for very different types of projects? How can IT development projects be more agile and more oriented towards delivering benefits to customers?

Key research areas

We have special expertise in:

• Complex scheduling problems
• Project management
• Programme management
• Project Portfolio management
• Benefits management from IT intensive projects

Research results and publications

Curious about some of our research results and publications?

• Project Management with Dynamic Scheduling

  
  Mario Vanhoucke
  Springer, 2012, 310 p. - ISBN 978-3-642251-74-0

• Measuring Time: Improving Project Performance Using Earned Value Management

  

  Mario Vanhoucke
  Springer, 2009, 164 p. - ISBN 978-1-4419-1013-4

• A decomposition-based genetic algorithm for the resource-constrained project-scheduling problem

  Dieter Debels & Mario Vanhoucke
  Operations Research, Vol. 55, Iss. 3, 2007, pp. 457-469

• All Project, programme & portfolio management publications.

Research for your organisation

In addition to conducting research that contributes to fundamental academic knowledge, we can also carry out practice-based research especially for your organisation.

• Explore research opportunities that may benefit your organisation.

Our experts

Meet the faculty and researchers who are experts in Project, programme & portfolio management.

Tips from our experts

Journals, portals and books keep you informed about trends in Project, programme & portfolio management. Some recommendations from our experts:

• www.pmi-belgium.be
• www.pmi.org
• www.ipma.ch
• www.ogc.gov.uk
• Guide to the project management body of knowledge by the Project Management Institute (2004)
• Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling and controlling by H. Kerzner (2005)
• Enterprise programme management by D. Williams & T. Parr (2006)

News

• Vlerick professor Mario Vanhoucke keynote speaker at EVM World 2012 Conference
• Second edition of EVA Europe conference
• New! First annual Earned Value conference in Europe

All news