Project Success and Project Management Success

Written by Magnus Stjernborg Koch - s175189

There are major benefits in evaluating and learning from past projects going forward to new projects. The evaluation can be performed in various ways, however, something that is always on the agenda is determining the success of how the project was managed and the outcome of the project.

Project success and project management success do not have an exact definition, however, are key terms when evaluating, and getting an idea of the overall result of an ended project. This is also important because is often during projects that the project manager loses sight of the project success in favor of ensuring the project management success. Which the result could be not solving the actual problem that was the scope of the project.

This article will give an understanding of how to determine project success and project management success. Furthermore, how to apply the determination of the success.

"Project success" versus "Project management success"

The success of a project is divided into two concepts project success and project management success. The main differences are that project management success is focused on the project process and the more practical project management tasks such as cost, time, and quality. Whereas project success deals with achieving the main purpose of the project in the first place.

Even though the definition above is relatively simple the project managers seem to still not understand or know the difference. Recent research from 2009 – Survey, which includes 340 project managers, project management Ph.D. students, and some other professionals from Australia, the USA, India, and Great Britain that only 46% of them answered “Yes” to the question: “Is Project Success the same as Project Management Success?”.

Survey answered by project managers - Is Project Success the same as Project Management Success?

Determining project success

Project success is focusing on successfully achieving the scope, goals, and change that was the original intention of the project. The project may be upgrading the IT infrastructure in national healthcare or the building of a bridge. Project success would in the healthcare IT infrastructure ensure that the new IT infrastructure is being used and giving the actual healthcare benefits of the digitalization. Whereas the building of a bridge project would be a project success if the bridge can carry the required cars over the bridge, working for future generations and resistant to the local environment.

The keywords that are important for the project’s success:

• Project goal
• Project objective
• Project purpose
• Project scope
• Project success criteria

Those keywords define why the project even exists and the impact. The bridge project would in short have the definition “The bridge contributes to improving the economy in the two regions being connected”, and the hospital IT infrastructure could be “The new IT infrastructure collects data that contributes to optimizing the workload.” These definitions of the projects are key elements to understanding the whole purpose of the project team and the project manager.

Projects might have purposes and impacts that do not happen in a short time. Those are called long-term purposes and impacts which happen in a relatively long time after the project is finished. The hospital IT infrastructure’s main purpose and impact will be long-term because it is excepted much data needs to be collected before it can be used, and the organization would also need to implement those changes suggested by the data which also takes time. The bridge project’s purpose and impact are to strengthen the economy between the two regions this would happen relatively fast because the project would when finished be available, and therefore fast provide its purpose and impact of it. The short-term and long-term are very much dependent on how the stakeholders see them, and they very much define which are short-term and which are long-term.

Most projects have multiple reasons for why they exist and multiple impacts. Therefore, it is important as a project manager to prioritize which reasons and impacts that are most important for the stakeholders. The best practice would be to do this together with the key stakeholders of the project.

Determining project management success

Project management success is more related to the management part of the project meaning delivering on schedule, within budget, and quality. In contrast to the healthcare IT infrastructure it would be the quality of the systems implemented, how it performs, and the number of bugs/changes needed after the project ends. The building of a bridge project would be the quality of resistance, durability, and lowering future operation costs. Both projects include delivering on schedule and within budget, which in general all projects do. The keywords that are important for project management success:

• Time
• Cost
• Quality

The keywords are all important in most projects. However, the degree of importance of each keyword varies from the project. The time is either described as the schedule or deadlines for the project. Most projects do have schedule requirements for the project's goal/purpose to be implemented. This schedule could be continuous milestones deadlines or just the date for the completion of the project. Cost is ensuring that the project is in compliance with the budget. Companies and organizations often allocate a certain amount of resources to the projects. This is somehow also closely related to the time that often is the factor for the project exceeding the allocated resources/budget. The last keyword is quality which describes how well the product, process, or service works or is designed. This is about ensuring quality consistency throughout the projects. However, quality is a wide term, and differs from projects, because the quality is determined by the stakeholder in the project.

Application

The main parts of evaluating and learning from previously executed projects are looking at the success elements of the projects, and what went well and what did not. The understanding of project success and project management success would help achieve a better understanding of which part of the project failed and might even highlight for similar projects that the project success always succussed, however, the project management success lacking in terms of cost. This could lead the organization to rethink its investment or cost management in those projects.

Evaluations and learning from previous projects should always be a part of the strategy of organizations. Thereby, even though a project might have failed to achieve its goal, purpose, schedule (time), investment (cost), or quality the spent resources can be used to improve the organization.

Doing a project initialization the relevant project success and project management success should be determined. Furthermore, the customer and project manager should agree on the importance and risk factors for the determined success criteria. The image below shows how this document could be constructed. During the project, the document should be updated if the criteria or scores change. As part of the evaluation and finalization of a project, the document should be evaluated.

Matrix to measure the importance and risk of failure for each project success and project management success

Limitations

The usage and the division of the project success and project management success will be limited to the understanding of the project. Many projects are complex, and therefore can be difficult to assign a goal or purpose (project success) or might change over time. The IT infrastructure for the hospitals might change from improving the patient’s user experience to collecting data and improving the hospital’s way of working. The project management success could in complex projects change from having the focus on cost to focusing on time.

Annotated bibliography

• General understanding of the defining project success - Baccarini, D. 1999, “The logical framework method for defining project success”, Project Management Journal

• Insight into project management success in information systems - Varajão, João1; Pereira, José Luís1; Trigo, António; Moura, Isabel1, International Journal of Information Systems and Project Management — 2021, Volume 9, Issue 4, pp. 62-74

• Measurement of project success - IN International Journal of Project Management — 1988, Volume 6, Issue 6, pp. 164-170 BY de Wit, Anton FROM Deminex (Norge) A/S

• Measurement of project success in construction - IN Sustainable Value Management for Construction Projects — 2017, pp. 75-86 BY Oke, Ayodeji E.; Aigbavboa, Clinton O

• The influence of project success by type of project - IN European Management Journal — 2007, Volume 25, Issue 4, pp. 298-309 BY Müller, Ralf1; Turner, Rodney2 FROM Umeå University1 Lille School of Management