I’ve written a lot about project success factors and thoughts on why projects fail. Depending on your organization or your customer or even your own perception, the definition of project success or failure can be very different. Usually, it’s one of three possible options:
- On time project delivery
- On budget project delivery
- Satisfied customer upon delivery
However, it can sometimes be a little gray. The fine line between project success and project failure may not be that clear. An example of different perceptions Case in point - I once led a project for a company where the client was a major airline. The client who was receiving the customized software implementation wanted it done in 90 days – something we had never done before in industries we were familiar with let alone in the airline industry where our software had never been implemented. A new industry meant new configurations to the software – to promise 90 days was absolutely crazy.
What was Sales thinking? What was our company leadership thinking? In the end, it wasn’t a 90 day implementation. At the 90 day mark I was onsite with a team doing everything we could to get things up and running but there were too many issues – too many things missed in the early requirements phase because we cut it short at the customer’s request based on the fact that they wanted an out of the box implementation. Yeah, right. That really wasn’t the case. Finally, about 90 days later, I finally handed off the system to them as close $38,000 over budget – most of which the customer did agree to pay. Was this project a success or a failure? I felt that it was a huge failure. I know our customer was not very satisfied though they did acknowledge that most of the blame rested with them. My organization’s executive management?
They actually considered it fairly successful because we implemented it, received payment for about 95% of the work (meaning we still made a large profit) and we were able to say we implemented our software in a new industry. Yeah! No. Feedback So now we want to hear from you. What does your company consider to be a successful project? What do you customers look for in a successful project? Is it on time delivery? On budget delivery? End user satisfaction? Something else? Let’s get some good comments going and generate some feedback because this is a topic with such a gray area that it definitely deserves further thought and evaluation. No two project outcomes are the same and it seems that everyone’s perception of project success is enough different to make this a little interesting.