How do you measure project success & project failure?

This is a debate in a lot of sites. And I am working (betwen others) trying to clarify this inside the PMI´s standards documents. You have to be carefull about what project success really is. Most of the times, meassure related to project success are wrong because it belongs to product instead of project. PMBOK is clear: "success is measured by product and project quality, timeliness, budget compliance, and degree of customer satisfaction". Customer satisfaction is addressed if you take into account to project quality.

I would define the success as the extent to which the project outcomes meet the objectives defined at the beginning of the project within the defined constraints.

It may be making a big profit for an organization and for another organization success may mean making a customer happy even if they made some monetary loss in the project. But, these have to be defined at the beginning. I think, the measurement of success should not be limited to time, cost and scope objectives.

I can think of a few projects that where technically (cost, time quality,...) success and in the end a failure.

You can meet all the client requirement, and get the project to be consider a failure.

You can have a project to be a success, but the program of projects a failure making all projects look like failure!

I see it an advantage to clearly define project success factor in the project specification in the beginning of the project, so every stakeholder is clear about the objective.