Criteria for project assignments in multiple-project environments

Project assignment, assigning a project to a project manager, is one of the organization's most strategically important decisions since it is a determinant of the project performance and the organizational performance. Despite its importance, project assignment is not well studied in the literature and it is performed intuitively in practice. By using concepts of case study research, this study explores project assignment processes in their real-life contexts. Then, the project assignment criteria obtained from the case studies are validated by a panel of experts, following the concepts of the Delphi method. In this paper, some of the research results are presented. In particular, we propose an integrated set of project assignment criteria, including some already proposed in the literature, and others that are new. As part of the criteria, we place a special emphasis on an integrated set of project managers' competencies that is applicable to the current multiple-project environments. In future research, we will use the criteria to build a model for project assignments. The conceptual outline of the model is presented.