Article - How to Measure Projects Success: Successful vs. Troubled vs. Failed Projects
Submitted by Jamal Moustafaev on Sat, 06/10/2017 - 21:25
Traditional Models
There are a lot of rating models out there that attempt to define project success or failure. There is the traditional one:
- Success: Finished (more or less) on time, within budget and met all requirements
- Challenged: Reaches conclusion, but with cost overruns and schedule slippages; possibly not all specifications are met
- Failure: Project was abandoned or cancelled due to project management failure
I can’t say that I am a big fan of it, because it fails to incorporate the value (i.e. the project portfolio management) perspective into the model. Recently I came across the one I really liked – a model that considers both project management (PM) and project portfolio management (PPM) sides proposed by Harold Kerzner:
- Complete Success: Project met success criteria, value was created and all constraints were adhered to
- Partial Success: Project met the success criteria, the client accepted the deliverables, value was created, not all of the constraints were met
- Partial Failure: Project was cancelled. But some IP was created that can be used on other projects
- Complete Failure: The project was abandoned and nothing was learned
Proposed Model
My view of a successful project is slightly different. I basically like to (1) add word “reasonably” to the “adhering to constraints” sentence and (2) include the recoverability variable into the equation:
- Project success is a function of:
- Business value is realized
- Project is delivered reasonably on-budget
- Project is delivered reasonably on time
- Project scope is delivered within reasonable limits
- NOTE: “reasonable” = “does not negate the business value”
- Projects should also be differentiated by their recoverability
Regarding the first point, let us examine the following famous examples: