A Framework to Dynamically Define Project Success

All of the information collected throughout a project lifecycle contributes to the project portfolio, where good practices or lessons learned from previous projects can be used to guide new projects. This information assists decision makers in managing projects and businesses more effectively. In order to share information about best practice amongst projects, the success of previous projects must be known. No conclusion about the success of a project can carry much conviction unless judged against some criteria, which measures the relative success of the project. The criteria used for evaluating project success have been the subject of unresolved debate for many years. The common criteria for judging project success includes a projects delivery on budget, in time and to a specified quality. However, this is a narrow view of success criteria which has been criticised for being inadequate for many reasons. Various attempts have been made in overcoming the perceived inadequacies by adding more dimensions to the basic criteria such as, user expectations, participants' satisfaction, performance measurement baseline, financial resources, environmental performance, stakeholder management and commercial value. Despite these new dimensions, projects have continually failed to benefit from the success of previous projects. One argument for this could be, because previous attempts have taken a generalised approach to solving a unique problem. This means either the current criteria are too abstract or insufficient for assessing project success. To date, existing research has failed to recognise that projects are unique temporary endeavours and as such, individual project success criteria should be used to reflect this. The question then becomes: how do we define unique success criteria for specific projects? This paper proposes a framework to dynamically define the success criteria for a project.