Is It Important To Measure Project Success Or Failure

Literature Review

The factors to measure success are even unpredictable because of the unprecedented changes which project manager’s faces. According to Salleh (2009), the study of project success or failure and critical success factors is a means of understanding and improving the project management process.

Undoubtedly, to characterize a project as successful or a failed is not an easy task. One of the problems encountered is that the different parties involved in the project view success in a different way. The science of Project Management has not yet succeeded in reaching a consensus for the definition of project success.

It is remarkable that the triple constraint is the sole universally accepted mean of evaluating projects. In other

He believes that success is better expressed at the beginning of a project in terms of key and measurable criteria upon which the relative success or failure of the project may be judged. He gives the following principle “The measure of project success, in terms of both process and product, must be defined at the beginning of the project as a basis for project management decision making and post-project evaluation.

For Max Wideman the project evaluation has four dimensions, namely: product scope, quality grade, time-to-produce and total cost at completion. He underlines the importance of the product success to the overall success of the project. He points out: “It is not sufficient these days to be on time, on budget, nor even that the product works just the way it should and satisfies all the requirements.

At the time of the transfer of the project’s product into “the care, custody and control” of the users, the product needs to be marketed. It needs to be sold into the market place. Then and only then, upon completion of a successful marketing campaign, will the product be a success and, ergo, the project also becomes a

These are Performance, Cost, Time and Scope. The first has to do with technical and functional performance requirements, the second with the labor and material cost needed to accomplish a task, the third with the time required for the project to be completed and last, the scope, that is the magnitude or size of the work. These are actually the four constraints for measuring project success established by the PMI.

Pinto & Rouhiainen (2001) as well as Kerzner (2001) add a new criterion to the triple constraint concerning the customer’s satisfaction/acceptance. This is very important because this criterion turns the eyes of the company outside the organization and towards the customer. Furthermore, it enhances the specific role of the marketplace in a successful project.

Verzuh in The fast forward MBA in project management (2004) agrees that the golden triangle is enough to define success. Except from time and cost parameters he mentions high quality. Verzuh links quality with the outcome of the project that must have two components: functionality (what the project is supposed to do) and performance (how well the functionality