Portfolio selection is a business process which has helped organisations identify an area of com-petitive advantage and it is a major concern to industrial players in the banking sectors. In order to enhance bank portfolio selection, cost, profitability, time and location are important parameters that decision-makers often consider. This study implements a fuzzy-TOPSIS (Technique for Or-der Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) framework to evaluate three potential portfolios (automated teller machine gallery, quick service point and branch) for a bank using the infor-mation from three decision-makers. An illustrative example of real bank information is used to demonstrate the proposed framework applicability. The complex proportional assessment of al-ternatives (COPRAS) method is also used as an evaluation technique and the results are com-pared, which yields that the results from the ranking order of fuzzy-TOPSIS and COPRAS were different. However, there is a consistency between the aggregation of intuition-based, fuzzy-TOPSIS and COPRAS ranks and fuzzy-TOPSIS ranking results. The presented framework is an easy-to-apply tool that improves portfolio selection decision in the banking system.

Social media are an integral part of modern society and they have become a big industry especial-ly after the emergence of social medias on Mobile devices. It has been a while that most Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) have used social medias to promote their business activities. Social medias also supply different facilities for SMEs to help them explore their services on the market. This is more evident for those SMEs whose activities are more project based. The pur-pose of this paper is to find out important factors influencing on building brand using social me-dias for SMEs. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 238 of SMEs’ experts in food industry in city of Tehran, Iran. Using principle component analysis, the study has determined that acquiring knowledge from social media, market approach in mass me-dia, market reaction approach in media, strategic mass media capability and social status influ-ence the most on building brand in SMEs.

Some projects are often performed by many subcontractors that cooperate with each other and some of them are conducted by outsourcing them to several firms; so subcontractors carry out activities in competition. Appropriate trade-off between time and cost and achieving more benefit and cost saving are objectives of both models. In this paper, it is investigated that how different subcontractors of a project can cooperate to achieve more advantages if possible and how sub-contractors can compete to make the results better and find the optimum cost to minimize the time for each of them. The competition here does not mean eliminating a competitor, but the aim is to challenge the contractors in order to choose the best decision. The purpose of this study is to address the challenges in time and cost management and to find more profit allocation among subcontractors and fair competition for fair allocation as well. A model based on cooperative game theory in time/cost trade-off problem of projects is suggested and then a competition model among subcontractors based on non-cooperative game theory is proposed. A case study is rep-resented to comprehensively illustrate the problem, the cooperative techniques of cooperative game theory, and the payoff matrix of non-cooperative model among subcontractors. Results of the proposed model reveal that subcontractors can obtain higher profit from cooperation if pos-sible. When they outsource the project and compete with each other, they must consider the in-teraction activities and choose the best strategies for cost saving and gain more reward from the client. Moreover, it is found that some techniques such as Shapley value, Core, Max-Min Core, or Equal Profit Method (EPM) are able to fairly assign extra profit of cooperation, and using the payoff matrix, Nash equilibrium, and Nash bargaining helps to find the optimum point to mini-mize time and cost for interaction activities state.

Project selection is considered as the first essential part of project portfolio management. Project selection is also considered as a process to evaluate each project idea and chooses the one with the biggest priority. Project selection plays an essential role in the entire life cycle of different projects. This paper presents a survey for project selection using multiple criteria decision mak-ing techniques. The study considers 60 papers from over the period 1980-2017. The results of the survey have indicated that integration of Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and analytical hierarchy process/analytical network process was the most popular techniques for project selection followed by VIKOR method.

Planning and scheduling processes in project management are carried out sequentially in prac-tice, i.e. planning project activities first without visibility of resource limitation, and then schedul-ing the project according to these pre-planned activities. This is a need to integrate these two pro-cesses. In this paper, we use Branch and Bound approach for generating all the feasible and non-feasible project schedules with/without activity splitting, and with a new criterion called “the Minimum Moments of Resources Required around X-Y axes (MMORR)”, we select the best feasible project schedule to integrate plan processing and schedule processing for engineering projects. The results illustrate that this integrated approach can effectively select the best feasible project schedule among alternatives, improves the resource utilization, and shortens the project lead time.

Employers are looking for reducing execution time and maintaining the quality of the projects that are the main objective of the projects. In this article, we focus on crashing projects by con-sidering different factors such as cost, time, quality and risk. For the proposed integer linear model, cost of conformance and cost of non-conformance are considered as parts of the costs of quality of deliverables in projects. The cost of conformance consists of the costs of training the project team, inspection and test of deliverables. The cost of non-conformance also includes costs of rework and scrap. Project risk management is one of the important aspects of the pro-jects. The present study also considers the impact of risks, which is highly applicable in projects with a high level of uncertainty. Results are presented using integer programming approach with the aim of minimizing the costs of the project.

Existing literature on lean principles reveals the impact of lean principles on the organizational performance. During the past few years, the Indian manufacturing context has been competing with the global competitors directly to sustain their presence. One of the big motivations behind this is the steps taken in favor of replacing the policies and regulations for the manufacturing context by the government of India. In present, the manufacturing context is still far away to get the sustainable market because of customer perception variation i.e. cost, delivery and quality re-lated issues. To overcome the uncertainties based on the attributes i.e. quality, productivity, de-livery etc., almost all the manufacturing units use the basic of lean principle i.e. apply the 5’S. Whereas the heavy industries used the VSM approach especially the automotive product manu-facturers. The work presented in this paper gives an insight on the application of lean principles in the manufacturing context and analyzes the impacts using ISM approach.

Earned Value Management (EVM) has been a well-known methodology used since the 1960s when the US department of defense proposed a standard method to measure project performance. This system relies on a set of often straightforward metrics to measure and evaluate the general health of a project. These metrics serve as early warning signals to timely detect project problems, or to exploit project opportunities. A key aspect of EVM is to estimate the completion cost of a project by considering both cost and schedule performance indices. However, good performance of cost and schedule performance indices does not necessarily guarantee cost effectiveness of the project regardless of the overhead costs. The reason is because, in most project-based organizations, overhead costs constitute a significant proportion of the total costs. However, EVM indices are usually calculated in the absence of the so-called overhead costs. This paper, first, seeks to remedy this problem by proposing a practical procedure of allocating overhead costs in project-based organizations. Then the traditional EVM indices are revised by consider-ing the allocated overhead costs. Finally, a case study demonstrates the applicability of the proposed method for a real-life project.

As the need for software increased, the number of software firms and the competition among them also increased. The software companies in developing countries like India can no longer survive based on cost advantage alone. The firms need to deliver competitively priced quality software products on time. This can be achieved through quantitatively managing the different phases or sub processes in software development process. But quantitative management of a process consisting of a set of interlinked sub processes or stages with the output of one sub pro-cess influencing that of subsequent stages and final output is not easy. The process performance models developed for quantitative management of software development process often model the final outcome in terms of factors from various stages together or focuses only on quantitatively managing a particular sub process independently. In manufacturing and other engineering indus-tries, the processes with multiple sub process are monitored and controlled using multistage pro-cess control methodology. This paper is an application of multistage statistical process control for managing the software development process. The suggested methodology is a combination of process performance models and control charts. The proposed methodology can be easily im-plemented for controlling various types of software projects like development projects, incre-mental development projects, testing projects etc. The methodology also provides the project manager the opportunity to tighten or relax the control at various sub processes based on the pro-ject team’s strengths and still achieve the goal on the final outcome.

In the era of technology, the demand of the software development increases at a very high speed, as software has touched the human’s life in all aspects. The better quality software development acquiring minimum development time leads to the team work in which a group of people has been formed that work together in a team for the software development. One of the most significant issues in effective and efficient teamwork is the team leader selection because the team lead-er is the person in any team that is going to handle all types of managerial activities such as leadership, motivation to others, etc. The team leader selection process may be dependent on numerous conflicting selection indexes that make it a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem. In the present research, an MCDM approach namely, Euclidean Distance Based Approximation (EDBA) which is based on the calculation of the composite distance value for each alter-native from a hypothetical optimal point is presented. The result of this study provides a comprehensive ranking of team leaders that leads to the right selection of team leader in information technology (IT) sector.