Project managers and organizational leaders agree that there are only a few factors that can determine the success of a project. There are four main factors that determine project success. You can say them in many ways, but they all come down to the following: time delivery, budget delivery, quality of final solution and customer satisfaction. This last one is often determined by the success of the project delivery team with the three others.
Is success a goal in project evaluation? Is it quantifiable? Is it possible to pinpoint the exact cause of a failed project? These are the questions that will likely be asked when looking at a project that failed. Let’s look at the lessons learned during and after a project to gain valuable insight into how to measure project success.
Is success in a project objective or subjective?
In most cases, I will go with the subjective. Why? It’s more of an assumption than a concrete fact. Yes, there will always be projects that go way over budget. For example, a $250,000 project with $750,000 in actual costs and $50,000 in change orders. It’s easy to see why one of these projects failed. It will be perceived more often than not. It could have been that the customer was uneasy due to poor communication during key points of project or a poor user acceptance testing (UAT), which had to be extended three times longer than expected due bug fixes and poor quality in delivery.
Project Management Institute’s Pulse Of The Profession 2017 survey revealed that only 14% of projects were considered to be failures. This despite 49% of projects being late, 43% exceeding budget, and 31% not meeting the original project goals. These three factors are the most important indicators of project success. However, many projects that didn’t meet these criteria were still considered successful. At the end, success or failure in a project depends more on how you feel about the project’s progress and how satisfied the customer with the final result.
Finding out where a project went wrong
As a project manager, lessons learned sessions are great. Ai if you can accept their truths. Ai because you can learn so much from everyone who was involved in the project. Not all projects have a lesson learned session.
Project post-mortems are a must to fully understand the last project and prepare for future successes. Gather all key stakeholders, including your delivery team, customer sponsor and team members, end users, subject matter specialists, and anyone else who is relevant. If you can sit down at the end of the project and discuss the successes and the failures, you will likely get valuable insight into what you should do next time. It is important to use the feedback you get to improve your next projects and to create reusable systems moving forward.
Lessons learned from a project
I believe in not only completing lessons learned sessions at project’s end, but actually performing several throughout the current project engagement. Why? Why? Learn lessons from a project you are currently working on will help you to either do the right thing and keep on the right track, or figure out what you are doing wrong now and take corrective actions rather than ending up with a failed project.
These in-progress lessons are best incorporated into the project schedule
