A Literature Survey on Project Portfolio Selection Problem

This study focuses on Project Portfolio Selection (PPS) that is an important activity for organizations in order to get a competitive advantage, increase their profit, and accomplish their objectives. There are numerous articles in the literature for PPS. However, the literature survey studies analyzing these articles are limited. The aim of this study is to conduct a literature survey and develop a classification scheme for PPS problem to support the researchers and practitioners working in the field of PPS. We present a classification scheme based on three categories: type of the study, methods used for PPS problem, and types of projects. In this study, 253 articles are deeply investigated and categorized according to the classification scheme. Critical analyses are conducted and various results are obtained. According to the results, although the PPS problem has multiple criteria and group decision-making characteristics, these methods are used in only 33% of the studies. Therefore, we present four future research directions for PPS problem in the context of multiple criteria and group decision-making: (1) importance of utilizing multiple criteria and group decision-making approaches for PPS problem, (2) need for methods that can handle information in different formats, missing values, and uncertainty, (3) need for decision support systems for PPS, (4) need for new methods specific to different types of projects.