A hierarchical approach to multi-project planning under uncertainty

We survey several viewpoints on the management of the planning complexity of multi-project organisations under uncertainty. Based on these viewpoints we propose a positioning framework to distinguish between different types of project-driven organisations. This framework is meant to aid project management in the choice between the various existing planning approaches. We also discuss the current state of the art of hierarchical planning approaches both for traditional manufacturing and for project environments. Next, we introduce a generic hierarchical project planning-and-control framework that serves to position planning methods for multi-project planning under uncertainty. We discuss various techniques for dealing with the uncertainty inherent to the different hierarchical stages in a multi-project organisation. In the last part of this paper we discuss two cases from practice and relate these to the positioning framework that is put forward in the paper.