Time to Kill the LOB Project?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Organizational Project Management   Strategy  

I’ve written a few articles this month on elements of PMI’s new research on Maximizing Project Success. This time I want to get extremely specific and focus on just one data point from that report: the functional line of business (LOB) success score on page 32. Why that one?

Let’s start with a quick summary of what PMI is calling the NPSS: the net project success score. They asked people to assess their most recently completed project on a score of 1-10, and classified them as follows:

• 1-6: project was unsuccessful
• 7-8: project had mixed results
• 9-10: project was successful

The NPSS was then the percentage who indicated successful projects less the percentage for the unsuccessful ones, so higher is better. In section seven of the report, where my data point for this article resides, PMI then considered how the NPSS varied by industry, project type and funding source.

For project type, most of the results were very similar. Physical infrastructure got a score of 42, IT implementation and upgrade projects got 41, as did software product development. Non-software product development projects were slightly lower at 38. And then, finally, there is the one that I have chosen to focus on: functional line of business (LOB) projects with an NPSS of just 24. Starting to see why I’m exploring it in more detail?

That’s 14 points lower …

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