Often I run into organizations where project teams are not measuring success consistently. For example, one project team might believe a project is successful if they stayed within the budget; however, the customer was unhappy with the project because their expectations weren’t met. Another project team might feel the project was successful because they kept everyone in the loop and met all milestones; however, the project had quality issues.
Please share what you have tracked as a measure of success on your projects. If there are measures you have tracked that are not reflected on the list, please share via comments. Would also love to hear your experiences around measuring project success. Thanks for participating!!
What is tracked as a measure of success for your organization’s largest projects? (Select the top three)
- Budget (24%, 11 Votes)
- Quality (22%, 10 Votes)
- Customer satisfaction (17%, 8 Votes)
- Time to market (13%, 6 Votes)
- Milestones (9%, 4 Votes)
- Effective use of resources (7%, 3 Votes)
- Use of and measurement against standard metrics (4%, 2 Votes)
- Management of risk (4%, 2 Votes)
- None of the above (0%, 0 Votes)
Total Voters: 17
Hal – Thanks for the comment! A well made point! Agreed that by measuring the completion of tasks against as promised, you are likely to increase individual’s estimating the time to completion more accurately, thereby ensuring the whole project becomes more certain of successful completion against an overall timeline. Question for you – from your experience, have you seen reduction in quality when precentage of promises are higher (due possibly to wanting to fulfill the promise at any cost) or have you seen better time-to-completion estimating skills?
Thanks again!
Gina
On lean projects we track the reliability of the planning system as measured by how often tasks complete as promised. Increasing reliability of completions counteracts the compound effects of dependence with variation. Consequently, the completion time of the whole project becomes more certain.