Empirically investigating the portfolio management process: findings from a large pharmaceutical company

This exploratory study analyzes cross-sectional project data from the enterprise information system at a large pharmaceutical company in order to gain insight into the company’s portfolio decision process and determinants of the ways in which decision analytic tools were applied in practice. Statistical measures based on the economic parameters describe individual projects and various partitions of the company’s portfolio of projects. Other statistics, such as number of scenarios, describe aspects of the structured decision process. The study found significant differences across project groups, and results in suggesting reasons for these differences.More generally, obtainable empirical data proved to be useful for studying the patterns in the use of portfolio decision analysis.