How to Measure Projects Success: Successful vs.

Troubled vs. Failed Projects

Traditional Models
There are a lot of rating models out there that attempt to define project success or failure. There
is the traditional one:

Success: Finished (more or less) on time, within budget and met all requirements
Challenged: Reaches conclusion, but with cost overruns and schedule slippages; possibly
not all specifications are met
Failure: Project was abandoned or cancelled due to project management failure

I cant say that I am a big fan of it, because it fails to incorporate the value (i.e. the project portfolio
management) perspective into the model. Recently I came across the one I really liked a model
that considers both project management (PM) and project portfolio management (PPM) sides
proposed by Harold Kerzner:

Complete Success: Project met success criteria, value was created and all constraints
were adhered to
Partial Success: Project met the success criteria, the client accepted the deliverables,
value was created, not all of the constraints were met
Partial Failure: Project was cancelled. But some IP was created that can be used on
other projects
Complete Failure: The project was abandoned and nothing was learned

Proposed Model
My view of a successful project is slightly different. I basically like to (1) add word reasonably
to the adhering to constraints sentence and (2) include the recoverability variable into the
equation:

Project success is a function of:

Business value is realized

Project is delivered reasonably on-budget
Project is delivered reasonably on time
Project scope is delivered within reasonable limits
NOTE: reasonable = does not negate the business value
Projects should also be differentiated by their recoverability

Regarding the first point, let us examine the following famous examples:

Titanic movie (cost -$200 million vs. revenues - $2 billion)

 First iPhone (cost - $150 million, revenues $2.7 billion)
Grand Theft Auto 5 (cost - $265 million, revenues US $1 billion in its first three days!)

Would we call Titanic a troubled project if it was released on 18-Jan-1998 instead of the original
18-Nov-1997? Would we think of the iPhone as a failure if its development ended up costing $160
million instead of the original $150 million? Of course, not!

So, what happens if we try to look at projects from the PM success/failure, PPM success/failure
and recoverability/non-recoverability perspective (see Table 1)?

Table 1

In the upper left corner (green) we have projects that are on track both from the PM and PPM
perspectives. These ventures should be just properly monitored and controlled until their
successful completion.

The next(yellow) layer contains the troubled projects (either on the PM and/or PPM side), but
these projects can still be saved by adjustments to their scope, schedules, budget, governance etc.
Finally, the last layer is comprised of the projects that are so deep in trouble from PM and/or PPM
viewpoints that the only option available to the stakeholders is to kill them, unless they are stay-
in-business or regulatory initiatives.

Questions:

What do you think of this project success/failure rating?

What other approaches have you seen?

About the Author

Jamal Moustafaev, MBA, PMP president and founder of Thinktank Consulting is an
internationally acclaimed expert and speaker in the areas of project/portfolio management, scope
definition, process improvement and corporate training. Jamal Moustafaev has done work for
private-sector companies and government organizations in Canada, US, Asia, Europe and Middle
East.