Over the years, I've helped many organizations define project success, either to identify project selection criteria or to secure resources for projects. This experience has shown me that organizations look at a variety of factors, but there are some common elements.
When I was working for Decarel Inc., a construction project management firm in Montréal, Québec, Canada, I was often involved at the conceptual stage of projects and programs. Our objective was to understand and fulfill the client's needs. This process often called for an awareness of how the buildings would impact the environment and community as well as the bottom line.
At Northumbrian Water Ltd., a water-treatment organization in Durham, U.K., the finance department looked at investment criteria, such as legal constraints, asset maintenance and service improvement.
I worked on a few programs with the facilities management group of Pfizer Ltd. in the United Kingdom between 1997 and 2001. At that time, the company's key success criteria for the programs and projects I worked on were ensuring critical areas' continuity, delivering to standards, understanding the cost impact of investments and maximizing personnel satisfaction. During a workshop with the data management team, the participants made it clear to me their key objective was not to follow project management procedures and report extensively, but to reduce time to delivery.
At Eurocontrol, the European air traffic management body, I was involved with developing an improvement program. There, the focus was on stakeholder expectations and a direct link of project deliverables to identified critical success factors defined with the stakeholders. Instead of a traditional tasks-schedule approach, the program took a benefits-milestone approach that proved most effective.
In recent work with corporate clients in the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, the key aspects that executives typically express interest in at the project and program levels are:
■ The capability of all systems to perform consistently
■ The actual measurable results—cultural as well as financial
■ The increase of the overall capability to respond to demand, both in time and in volume.
Benefits should be measured on their actual “realization” beyond the product's delivery.
The Common Denominator
This wide brushstroke through industries and countries shows that, although there are slight differences between each organization, some common threads can be identified:
■ Financial measures are important, but they cannot be the only gauge of success. Response to stakeholder needs is essential, and these stakeholders typically include customers, shareholders, business partners, employees and the community.
■ Maintaining current capabilities while improving capacity to respond to change constitutes a delicate but necessary balance.
■ Regulatory and legal impacts have become an element of concern since the recent financial scandals that led to the adoption of Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. However, organizations that seek sustainable results should evaluate opportunities as well as risks.
■ Benefits realization requires the introduction of program management processes that go beyond project deliverables to measure the operational value of project outputs.
Finally, project success, when measured for selection purposes at the portfolio level, should not only take into account contribution to benefits, but also achievability. Achievability measures the capability to realize the project in terms of resources, competencies and complexity within the required parameters. Only a combined benefits-achievability measure will enable executives to make the right investment decisions. PM
Michel Thiry, PMI Fellow, PMP, has more than 30 years of global experience at project-based organizations. He has written and lectured at the academic and practitioner levels, and facilitated expert panels in international forums.