A lot of projects are setup to fail because they have not considered the project success criteria needed from the start.
Project Initiation & Planning
So many projects are doomed to failure right from the beginning, they just don’t know it yet.
It’s a key fact that when you start a project, you don’t know what you don’t know.
When you start a project it’s true to say ‘you don’t know, what you don’t know‘…
This is because projects are often brought into existence to do things that haven’t been done before, or maybe not done in this way or to this timescale (more on that later!).
Project Success Criteria
So what are some of the areas to focus on to ensure your projects is a success? We’ll run through a few here that are likely to come up in the Initiation and Planning stage of the project lifecycle.
- Having a clear and understood project Business Case
- An inclusive and transparent projects Approval process
- An estimation process for both costs and timescales (ideally with a ‘range’ rather than a fixed number or go-live date)
- An agreed view on the project scope (with more detail on the first phase)
- Clear and public ‘business’ ownership and accountability (engagement and visibility outside of the project delivery group’s bubble
- A realistic and open / transparent Planning process
- A ‘left to right’ approach to planning rather than setting a date and working backwards to now from that!
- A solid focus on the ‘Initiation phase with a clear stop/go gate to move onto the next phase
That’s just a list of Project Success Criteria
This is the list of success criteria that if flipped would equate to the top failure reasons that projects fail.
I’m a passionate believer that the initiation of projects is a key factor in achieving project success. Rushing this project lifecycle phase means that any of the criteria above can be sub-optimal or worse, missed altogether, exposing the project to many problems and hurdles to success.
Let’s explore each of these Initiation Phase success criteria in turn.
Clear and Understood Project Business Case
The business case is what underpins the value that the project will delvier to the organisation.
This value does not necessarily need to be justified on the financials. Not all project need a positive ROI to get approved.
Projects that cost more than they deliver back in savings are often called ‘investment case’ projects. The money is a justifiable investment in progressing the business in longer term or non-financial benefit case ways.
The Business Case is a key success criteria in enabling all parties to understand what the project is aiming to achieve, and how it aligns with the organisations wider strategy and objectives.
If the business case is missing areas, the thinking within it is not matured to a point of alignment with the business stakeholders and strategy then it runs the risk of challenge later when the project hits problems and the loss of support as it can’t clearly demonstrate how it is providing value to the business.
The Business Case when well written will be the solid foundation that the project is built on and refers back to periodically to ensure the value is being delivered by the project.
Transparent Approvals Process
How the project gets approved tells us a lot about its chances of success.
Many times projects receive ‘lite’ approval or are waved into existence with little scrutiny or challenge.
Without challenge at the initiation phase projects run the risk of missing things. Having a broad spectrum of stakeholders involved in the impact assessment and approval of a new project ensures the people affected are able to review and understand what is to be achieved, what the changes are likely to be and what it means to their role or part of the organisation.
These insights can trigger questions that are unique to those stakeholders given their knowledge of the organisation, the infrastructure, the environment and in many cases the culture and politics that the project may collide with.
You see, the project team is often not a part of the environment that the change is being applied to. The project team knowledge is far less than the stakeholders that are part of the review.
So having a well represented approval process with the right stakeholders and a transparent view of the project and how it is to be approved is a key project success criteria.
Project Estimation Process
There is evidence that suggests that projects should not ‘fix’ a date for the go-live of the outcome or even set a rigid figure on the costs of the project.
Now there will be many people tha squeal at this heresy, but if you think about it…..we just said that we don’t know what we don’t know….so do we REALLY want project managers to give us SOLID and FIXED costs and Go-Live DATES when they are in a position of limited and incomplete knowledge of the works they are setting off on?
I for one would not want to lock-in decisions based on incomplete information.
So key success criteria for project success would be to have a range for the costs at the initiation phase with possibly a tighter range applied to the first phase and broader ranges for the later phases.
The estimation process can be its own dark-art with many approaches. The three-point estimation is a well understood approach that I support.
Lack of Accountability
Accountability is the backbone of a project. Whether it’s the Project Manager, the Project Sponsor or the Business Lead, if you don’t have people taking ownership and accountability the project will not follow a true path.
When a project comes into existence it has the potential to form into many different paths. The firming up of the scope is what gives the project direction.
If people do not take accountability and commit then this direction can be set incorrectly. Also, if decisions are not firm and not committed to then this path can be changed.
Not that all change is bad but without accountability then people are able to change without solid challenge and scrutiny. This sort of change would leave the project built on an unstable foundation with changing direction, additional costs and rework required.
A key project success criteria is Accountability in ensuring what project Roles are assigned and followed through. People’s roles can overlap if clear accountability is not present and work can be duplicated, again leading to additional costs and delays.
Insufficient or Over-optimisitc Planning
I am sure this has never been a project success factor that your project has experienced – but it does happen.
Plans can be put together either quickly or maybe by inexperienced planners, wither way the end result is a poor plan that is missing key items or aspects.
Insufficient planning can be at the technical end, a poor development of the plan within MS Project with no joining up of the successors and predecessors rendering the plan not completely useless but far from ideal.
Or at the simple end misleading in that it’s based on right-to-left planning and while depicts activities to be completed is fictitious and not representative of the real world so doomed to failure.
Having a realistic, left to right plan that has been through a number of planning rounds with a broad set of stakeholders and a much higher chance of capturing more of the activities needed to be completed and honest durations of tasks is a key project success criteria to achieve.
Lack of diligence in Project Startup
Overall, a lack of thoroughness in the project startup phase is a key contributor to project failure. Things get missed, corners get cut and the project gets setup for failure and not success.
If there’s one key takeaway of all the above, a strong project success criteria is to spend the time needed and to engage everyone that can be in the project startup phase and make it thorough.