Aug24
That little post on Portfolio Analysis in Excel that I threw out into the Interwebs a couple of weeks ago seemed to engender a surprising amount of conversation – both online and off. As I’ve stated before, I am not a math major, but figuring that as of this writing we had three distinct comments posted – and generally most posts generate zero comments, then by my calculations, if I figure 3/0...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on
Tuesday, 24 Aug 2010 08:40.
Jul11
This is the next post in a series describing how the Portfolio Analysis pieces of Project Server 2010 work under the hood. This post will discuss how the Scatter Chart is calculated and provide an Excel model for assessing how it works. I wrote this post as part of an exercise to make sure that I understand what’s going on in Project Server – as well as making an initial attempt to lay the pi...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on
Sunday, 11 Jul 2010 09:49.
Jul7
This is the next post in a series describing how the Portfolio Analysis pieces of Project Server 2010 work under the hood. This post will discuss how the Strategic Alignment chart is calculated and provide an Excel model for assessing how it works. I wrote this post as part of an exercise to make sure that I understand what’s going on in Project Server – as well as making an initial attempt t...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on
Wednesday, 7 Jul 2010 08:05.
Jul2
This is the next post in a series describing how the Portfolio Analysis pieces of Project Server 2010 work under the hood. This post will discuss how the Efficient Frontier is calculated for a portfolio of projects. I wrote this post as part of an exercise to make sure that I understand what’s going on in Project Server – as well as making an initial attempt to lay the pieces out in a way tha...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on
Friday, 2 Jul 2010 08:57.
Jun28
This is the next post in a series describing how the Portfolio Analysis pieces of Project Server 2010 work under the hood. This post will discuss how portfolios are impacted by forcing in or out specific projects. I wrote this post as part of an exercise to make sure that I understand what’s going on in Project Server – as well as making an initial attempt to lay the pieces out in a way that ...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on
Monday, 28 Jun 2010 10:33.
Jun25
Here is the next post in my series describing how the Portfolio Analysis module works in Project Server. I wrote this post as part of an exercise to make sure that I understand what’s going in Project Server – as well as making an initial attempt to lay the pieces out in a way that my clients would understand. My goal is to develop an Excel-based model that takes the same inputs as Project Se...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on
Friday, 25 Jun 2010 11:02.
Jun24
DISCLAIMER: (Just to make sure this is clear, I am adding this disclaimer to the posting.) The worksheet referenced below is not a competing product to Project Server 2010, and does not contain references to any proprietary code. It was developed based on publicly available information as an Excel mock up of the server-side portfolio optimization calculations found in Project Server. The g...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on
Thursday, 24 Jun 2010 07:42.
Jun19
In my previous post, I gave an example of how Pairwise Analysis works, and presented a conceptual model in Excel of the driver and project prioritization engine within Microsoft Project Server 2010. That model worked well with simple driver prioritization scenarios, but seemed to display a wide variance with Project Server calculations in more complex scenarios. This left me unsatisfied, and ...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on
Saturday, 19 Jun 2010 09:04.
Jun15
Chatting with a mentor from a previous life recently as I prepped for a presentation, and he pointed me to this excellent 1986 article by Herbert Simon, the late Nobel prize winning social scientist. If you’re attending my PMI Houston presentation on Project Teams as Innovation Systems on Wednesday, then this would be a great follow up (or even pre) read.
It’s an overview of the state of deci...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on
Tuesday, 15 Jun 2010 07:50.
Jun1
I’ve seen a couple of questions posted to the online forums of late asking about how the Portfolio Management heuristics work in Project Server 2010. Since I know that I will have to explain this to my own clients, I figured that I would take an initial stab at demystifying how the portfolio optimization calculations work. As a disclaimer, note that I refer to this process as “Pairwise Analys...
Posted by Andrew Lavinsky on
Tuesday, 1 Jun 2010 10:02.