How Microsoft Project Server calculates Business drivers priorities

As part of a series of articles I wrote on Portfolio Analysis within Microsoft Project Server 2013, there is another topic I was interested to understand. How Microsoft Project Server calculate business drivers prioritization.

To highlight this, I will reuse business drivers I have defined previously for my article on the EfficientFrontier:

• Expand revenue of the Bobby Brown product line
•  Increase product awareness among people between 13 and 18
•  Increase the number of members of the VIP club
• Introduction of new premium products
• Reduce employee turn over
• Reduction of support call waiting time

There are within Project Server 2013, two ways to prioritize business drivers:

•  A “Calculated” method where an automatic pair comparison of each driver generates relative priority scores (the one we will see here),
•  And a “Manual” method where users specify priority values for each driver directly.

Understanding the Efficient Frontier

The Efficient Frontier is a concept defined by the Nobel Prize winner HarryMarkowitz as part of an article published in 1952 named “Portfolio Selection”. He stated that an optimal portfolio is the one that delivers the best possible return for a given level of risk or investment. Applied to portfolio analysis, the Efficient Frontier is represented as a curve, and plots strategic value (as a percentage) against Portfolio Cost. It might happen, often when you choose to force-out some projects, that the portfolio selection scenarios is plotted under the curve, which mean that the portfolio is not optimal.