The Superbowl of Project Success
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by Richard Maltzman,
Dave Shirley
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Date
Today, on Superbowl Sunday* - it seems appropriate to talk about success.
For our local team, the New England Patriots, it was a successful season - to a point. They had a tremendous year, but did not win in their game against the Baltimore Ravens, who now advance to the Superbowl to play the NFC's winner, the San Francisco 49'ers.
But what about PROJECT success? This has been getting a lot of dicussion lately, and we've been paying attention, becuase a careless definition of project success would be counterproductive to sustainable project management which is our main focus.
Let's use as an example an article iIn this month's issue of Project Management Journal. This journal, by the way, is often overlooked by practitioners of our field, becuase authors insist on using words in their article titles (and these are all real examples) like:
-
Bayesian
-
Orthagonal
-
Typology
-
Psycotherapy
-
Criticality
These are not always the favorites of a casual weekend reader. Still, there is excellent material in the articles - one needs to just trust that you can get past those academic titles and find that value. It's there.
In this month's issue, there is one article called, "Managing the Intangible Aspects of a Project: The Affect of Vision, Artifacts, and Leader Values on Project Spirit and Success in Technology-Driven Projects".
Yes - it's a mouthful, as usual, but it's actually quite an interesting article with findings about how motivation and success are related to the amount of effort put into the 'team spirit' and identity of a proejct team.
But we were intrigued (quite orthagonally and in a Bayesian sense) by the listing they featured on the definition of "project success". Here it is:
-
The project was completed on time or earlier
-
The project was completed within or below budget
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The product met all customer requirements
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The customer was highly satisfied
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The product improved the customer's performance
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There is a great chance that the customer will return for additional business
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The project resulted in business success for the company that implmented it
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The proejct increased the profitability of the organization implementing it
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The project had a positive ROI
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The project increased market share or outreach amoung customers/users
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The project will lead to additional new markets or new customers/users
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The project will lead to additional new business or new products or services
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The product has the potential to create new markets or new customers/users
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The project created new technologies or new capabilities for future use
Notice that we have highlighted the bottom chunk of 'success bullets' in green.
Why?
These green bullets - and we applaud the authors for this - go beyond the traditional view that project managers usually take when they look at project success (and therefore project completion). By taking the view that these 'greener' bullets indicate, the PM takes the longer-term, more sustainable view that we have been talking about now for about four years. We would of course add some others, and we did in our book, Green Project Management. But for now, just focus on these authors' bullets.
We will continue to blog on this subject, in fact we have a request in to the authors of this article for more data about these definitions and how they contributed to 'project spirit'; but for now, we'd like to hear from you. How many of the above bullets do YOU and YOUR PROJECT TEAM use when defining success?
So, as you watch the Superbowl - or during halftime as you count up the money you may have won by selecting squares for the end-of-quarter-scores - think about this. And take a moment to respond, we really are interested in your definition of project success in the light of these bullets.
*in the United States, this is our celebration of the final game of the American Footbal season, with the winners of the National and American Football Conferences playing each other for the National Footbal League championship
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: February 03, 2013 12:54 PM |
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Comments (1)
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 | Anonymous |
The Green Bullets are the true source of whether a project was successful or not. We include the traditional weights in our scoring system but in the last few years have put a higher emphasis on business delivery. The Business Outcome portion of our scoring system maps to the Green Bullets. To score we use a point system.
Time – 1 point
Budget – 1 point
Scope – 1 point
Implementation quality – maximum of 1.5 points
Fall Short – 0 points (material LoB or customer impact)
Meet – 1 point (no material LoB or customer impact)
If Project risk = High add .5 points
Business Outcome – maximum of 1.5 points as determined by Project TPB Sponsor:
Fall Short – 0 points
Meet – 1 point
Exceed – 1.5 points - Exceeds can be achieved by any of the following:
1) Delivering greater business value than defined by business case
2) Delivering business value earlier than implementation date defined after planning/design
Total possible: 6 points
4.5+ Green Project
< 4.5 Red Project
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