What is a measure of success in major project management?

With many major projects taking years to complete and costing millions or billions of dollars, it can be arbitrary to measure how successful they have been.

When evaluating the success of major projects, it is therefore important to think about the project as a whole. You should consider the outcomes and benefits of the major project over an extended period and for different stakeholders.

In fact, there are two measures of success that you must be able to make a distinction between:

How do these differ?

Project management success

You can judge project management success according to whether the project has delivered according to three factors: the budget, the scope and the schedule.

A project could be successful in terms of project management success if it has met these areas agreed in the planning phase. Alternatively, the project may still be successful if it has delivered to a budget, cost and scope comparable with (or better than) similar projects.

Project success

You can judge project success by asking whether the project has been good value for money, ie. a good final cost-benefit analysis. This view of project success considers the value of the project beyond the benefits gained by the direct stakeholders themselves. As you will see later in this lesson, project success means viewing the project from a wider perspective.

Please refer to the glossary to check any terminology you are unfamiliar with: Glossary of Project Management Terms

Coming up....

In the next section you will explore a case study demonstrating the different measures of project success.