Measuring Project Success

Can a project be years late, £ Billions over budget, and a success?  It appears the answer to this question depends on your perspective.

In a recent post looking at project success, we identified a significant anomaly between the percentage of projects classed as failing and the perception of executives.  In round terms some 70% of projects are classified as failing, but over 70% of executives think their organization deliver projects successfully. You can read the updated version of this post at: Do 80% of organizations average a project failure rate of 80%?

A number people providing feedback on the original post suggested this anomaly could be caused by different perspectives of project success. This concept has been identified by many people over the years as the difference between project management success (on time and on budget), verses project success (the delivery of value to stakeholders).  These different types of project success are briefly discussed in Achieving Real Project Success.

Measuring project management success.

However, the concept of project management success, typically measured as delivering the project on time and on budget, raises its own set of challenges. 
Consider the following:

Two different organizations own the same commercial software, and decide to implement the latest upgrade, essentially two identical projects to deliver similar benefits to two separate organizations.

• Organization A estimates their project will cost $110,000 and the work is approved.
• Organization B estimates their project will cost $80,000 and the work is approved.

Both projects complete the work successfully and on time. The final project costs are compiled and the close-out reports completed:

• Organization A has a final cost of $100,000 – $10,000 under budget, and the project is declared a success!
• Organization B has a final cost of $90,000 – $10,000 over budget, and the project is declared a failure! 

But Organization B has achieved the organizational benefits of the upgrade for $10,000 less than Organization A – which project was really successful?

The above example is simplistic but clearly shows the need for better processes to define project success and failure. Comparing the estimated time and cost at the start with the achieved outcomes can be very misleading. On time and on budget may be valid measures for a contractor delivering a project under a commercial contract that defines a fixed time and cost for completion, but for everyone else the question of success is more nuanced. 

For example, consider the Crossrail Project in London, initiated in 2008 to deliver the new Elizabeth Line, it is years late and £Billions over budget. But since its partial opening in May 2022, more than 100 million journeys have been made on the Elizabeth Line, currently around 600,000 journeys are made every day. This patronage is above forecast levels and the project is on track to break even by the end of the 2023/24 financial year. Even the British Tabloid press are declaring the Elizabeth Line a success despite the final upgrade to achieve 100% of the planned service frequencies not happening until 21^st May 2023 (for our thoughts on Crossrail over the years see: https://mosaicprojects.com.au/PMKI-ITC-012.php#Crossrail).

The May 2023 upgrade will mark the successful completion of the Crossrail project and its final transition to operations. This is some 4 ½ years after the original planned opening date in December 2018 and £4+ Billion over budget – so who gets to declare it a success and what is the basis for measuring this? When we looked at this question in  Success and Stakeholders our conclusion was success is gifted to you by your stakeholders, you have to earn the gift by delivering the project, but there is no way of knowing for sure if it will be considered successful. The Elizabeth Line has achieved the accolade of successful from its stakeholders, but this is hardly a scientific measure, or an effective KPI for general use. Which poses the question how do you realistically measure project success? Asking the question is easy, finding a generally applicable answer is not – any ideas??
For more on defining project success see: https://mosaicprojects.com.au/PMKI-ORG-055.php#Success