Overall success in any business endeavor is the ultimate goal, but every small success is vital to the whole project. Identifying and measuring the successes and failures of a project allows for projection, prediction, and adaptation.
Measuring project success hinges on metrics for investments and returns in relation to the demands being requested. How much time and money can be afforded? How much time and money is required? How efficiently can time and money be managed while hitting these guideposts? Project management requires weighing the timeline and budget against consumer satisfaction or desired outcomes. Failure is subjective, which makes understanding metrics for success and being able to define them clearly so important.
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Defining Successful Criteria
Defining what will constitute success and why is basically the backbone of any project management strategy. Time after time, the reason for a project’s failure can be tied to using the wrong metrics to measure success. This isn’t new and isn’t limited to specific industries. Learning a lesson from Moneyball is a wise move for any project management situation. In Michael Lewis’s best-selling book he illustrates how The Oakland Athletics baseball team found drastic new success in looking closely at specific metrics and deciding how to prioritize them and why. In the case of Moneyball, overlooking signs of success that were obscured by more visible indicators was the downfall for other teams being built and managed.
This is such a vital lesson to learn in project management. Don’t ignore any direct signifiers that point to a desired result, even if it doesn’t seem as closely related. It is also important to keep a team on the same page with understanding these valuable metrics once they are identified. Not being aligned can lead to miscommunication and a disconnect throughout the project.
Which Performance Metric Best Measure A Project’s Success?
To better understand how to measure success and which metrics to look at most directly and weigh the heaviest, let’s take a brief look at common criteria types.
Scope
Scope refers to the entire overview and understanding of the goals and desired results of a project and the necessary work and actions needed to accomplish the specific goals being set out. Goals, tasks, deadlines, expectations, and expenses are all a part of a project’s scope.
Understanding the limits to this criteria is just as important as understanding the benefits. Sometimes projects require adaptation or reaction to changing needs and circumstances. This can mean the weight of adhering to the plan may vary in necessity. That being said, understanding, recognizing, and defining that a fully designed scope isn’t needed or desired for a project to begin is also very important.
One key challenge with scope is that as the project evolves and progresses, the scope may need to expand. Scope creep refers to the scope of a project changing, and more specifically, changing without the necessary balance in other areas to accommodate what is being expanded and what can or can’t be.
Timeline
Scheduling a comprehensive and manageable timeline needs the planning and assessment to know final dates, milestone requirements, and all deadlines, including the spectrum of necessity that some following steps or tasks may hinge on.
There are so many important metrics to consider around planning and measuring a successful timeline. Overworked employees can be a death sentence to a schedule. Managing labor and production resources is key to making sure efficiency can translate into better scheduling.
Keeping track of everything and every step is vital to timeline management. Tools to aggregate and evaluate timeline-related performance metrics can be an essential part of timeline management. Any missed milestone is an immediate warning sign and needs to be addressed. By keeping track of how much of a task, or how many tasks are being completed, it is easier to see direct accounting of earned value and planned value indexes.
Budget
Budget is of course where the money is. Literally and figuratively. Estimating a budget correctly can be a significant challenge on any project, but going over budget is almost always a result of poor planning. Budgeting is about accounting for EVERY expense, but it is also about planning for things to go wrong and understanding how to balance for contingencies.
A project budget is connected to the success of all other metrics. It is important to understand the priority of budget constraints, because if this is the primary limitation or constraint, then all other areas need to be planned to fit the initial budget. Project management is about recognizing which Jenga blocks can’t be wiggled.
Earned Value Management (EVM) combines scope, timeline, and budget to project a planned value and an earned value in comparison to costs. This system allows for a prediction of future results based on planned and actual values. Earned value analysis and earned value systems software can be utilized to better crack the code of how to best react to the gathered metrics present.
Achievement Of Defined Goals
Business goals may vary in how closely they are connected to pure return on investment. Many business projects may have other detailed goals to meet. The important part of this metric is seeing the desired payoff, whatever it may be. Sometimes the most important part of understanding this metric is by understanding the lateral results that could be achieved.
Asking questions about what your project actually is can mean everything. Is there a high risk of return? Is the function of the project unique? Is the priority of these desired results necessary to the success of other projects, and how? Comparing intent to the needs of the business will give a good understanding of the balances to hit.
Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction can be different from monetary success. Depending on the project, how it is received by the customer may override everything else. This can be harder to measure sometimes, as it is not always quantified in profit or sales. Especially in the initial launch phases of a project. The problem is, there is a bit of a duality. This metric can be the VERY MOST IMPORTANT metric to long term success, brand loyalty and trust, and referred customer traffic, but it is also hard to prioritize over numbers showing positive returns.
This metric takes some nuance to analyze. Social media success and customer feedback and surveys show how customer satisfaction lines up to the other areas of success evaluation.
Planning is likely going to have the largest impact on the success of a project from top to bottom, but being aware of how to measure success can be invaluable to keeping timeline and budget expansions from spinning out of control. When deciding how to analyse and implement the data gathered, staying on the same page and understanding goals is always going to help deliver successful results.
