The downside risk of project portfolios: The impact of capital investment projects and the value of project efficiency and project risk management programmes

This article deals with the economic conditions required from a candidate capital investment project for its admittance within a firm's project portfolio. A stationary stochastic model is used to assess a project's NP˜V and its impact on a firm's expected profitability and down-side operational risk when measured by its probability of loss and conditional expected loss. In order to lower the firm's operational risk the PMO can devise, assess and implement project efficiency management (PEM) and project risk management programmes (PRM) during the PM phase of the candidate capital investment project; their economic value determines their maximum admissible implementation budgets. When the correlation coefficient between the economic activities of the candidate project and the firm takes a negative value exceeding a threshold value, its addition to the firm's project portfolio will reduce the firm's operational risk while rendering counter-productive the implementation of any effective PRM programme.1