Multicriteria Portfolio Modeling for the Development of Shared Action Agendas

Organizations and collaborative networks set strategic directions by building agendas of action topics that will be implemented subject to limited resources and other constraints. The development of such agendas typically involves several decision makers and possibly other stakeholders who may have divergent views about how the topics contribute to multiple objectives. The processes of developing these agendas can be supported by methods of multicriteria decision analysis which allow the group members’ preferences to be systematically and transparently synthesized. In this paper, we extend methods of portfolio decision analysis with the aim of guiding the development of agendas in the presence of possibly incomplete information about the group members’ preferences and the impacts of the proposed topics. Specifically, we define performance measures that convey (i) what topics are favored by individual group members and (ii) how acceptable alternative portfolios of topic agendas are to the whole group. The methods are illustrated with data from a real case study for the development of a national research agenda on wood products in Finland.