Critical Gaps in Portfolio Management Implementation: A Brazilian Case Study

In the existing literature on portfolio one meets diverse approaches, referred to the techniques of classification, selection, prioritization and projects management. The main objective of this article is to investigate the practice of portfolio management in a Brazilian company, and to identify gaps and opportunities of improvement. The empiric research carried out for this work is of qualitative nature and it was conducted by the case study method. The case choice criteria have been the following ones: Brazilian Company with intensive capital and, nationally and internationally remarkable for its revenues, investment policies and its portfolio of projects. The selected company acts in the chemical and petrochemical segments with private and national capital. It has been collected 5 years data on the portfolio of projects of the referred organization, getting a picture of the sorts of the developed projects and their numbers, their characteristic results in terms of fulfilling their datelines and their budgets. The period of analyses was set so that it would allow a valuation of the outcome resulted from the decisions. It was possible to verify the practical application of the techniques proposed in the literature for the classification, the selection of the projects and the portfolio management. It was also possible to identify some critical variables for the implementation of the projects of the company in study, signaling that they are critical factors of success for implementations of projects in Brazil. For the found problems, the present work proposes solutions to be confirmed in future studies

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