Project Success Criteria


There is a considerable volume of literature dealing with project success, and this tends to fall into three categories—those dealing primarily with the criteria by which project success is judged; those primarily concerned with the factors contributing to the achievement of success; and those that confuse the two.

Although not strongly supported by empirical research, there are many articles that address the issue of project success criteria, including a number of papers presented at the Project Management Institute (PMI ) Seminars & Symposium held in Montreal, Canada in 1986, which focused on this theme.

These papers tend to agree on a number of issues. Firstly, project success is an important project management issue; secondly, it is one of the most frequently discussed topics; and thirdly, there is a lack of agreement concerning the criteria by which success is judged (Pinto and Slevin 1988; Freeman and Beale 1992; Shenhar, Levy, and Dvir 1997; Baccarini 1999). A review of the literature further reveals that there is, in fact, a high level of agreement with the definition provided by Baker, Murphy, and Fisher (1988, 902), that project success is a matter of perception and that a project will be most likely to be perceived to be an "overall success" if:

the project meets the technical performance specifications and/or mission to be performed, and if there is a high level of satisfaction concerning the project outcome among key people on the project team, and key users or clientele of the project effort (Baker, Murphy, and Fisher 1988).

Furthermore, there is general agreement that although schedule and budget performance alone are considered inadequate as measures of project success, they are still important components of the overall construct. Quality appears intertwined with issues of technical performance, specifications, and achievement of functional objectives and it is achievement against these criteria that will be most subject to variation in perception by multiple project stakeholders.




The Frontiers of Project Management Research
The Frontiers of Project Management Research
ISBN: 1880410745
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 207

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