What is Work Management Success?

 

I believe most project managers would agree that pushing projects to completion on time and under budget should not be the only measure of whether or not a project is successful.  Ultimately the project needs to provide business value to the organization.  Here are some other considerations that should be applied to successful projects:

1. Success is about doing the right projects, not just doing them right.  Delivering business value and satisfying customers is becoming more important than ever—and it starts with the evaluation of which potential projects will meet those needs and provide that value in the first place.  Hopefully, this has always been important, but organizations are realizing that they have to do more than give lip service to meeting customer expectations while meeting organizational goals.  It must become a primary measurement of how we determine the success or failure of any IT project.
2. Project teams need to completely understand and address the business needs of every project.  Although everyone would agree that "quality" is very subjective, if everyone on the team doesn't have a thorough understanding of the cost of defects and rework, it doesn't matter what work management tool you use, it won't help.  Edward Deming used to talk about how organizations must build quality into the product, it can't really be inspected in.  Quality assurance needs to be a part of every process from start to finish.  Smart organizations are looking at defects and their root causes through the project life-cycle to develop methodologies that improve the quality of their final deliverables.
3. The final product needs to be stable, compatible, and easily maintainable.  It's just too expensive for organizations to maintain software that's unreliable or incompatible with current systems.  With staff and maintenance budgets at a premium, software that isn't will be abandoned for something that is.

The way organizations measure the success of project-based work is changing.  Managers who leverage project management tools to meet the new objectives are able to better address business needs and ultimately increase the value within their organizations. 

How do you measure project success?