Project Management: 10 Key Success Factors

More often than not, projects do not meet their stated objectives. The result is often wasted money, frayed tempers and burned out employees. Research houses such as the Standish Group, Gartner and the Project Management Institute study why such an alarmingly large proportion of projects meet with failure. The same reasons for missed deadlines, budget overruns and unfulfilled deliverables crop up time after time. The most common reasons for disappointment are:

• business unclear on project objectives
• weak project governance structures
• poor project management skills
• excessive scope creep
• requirements not properly defined
• stakeholders left isolated from project processes
• poor risk management
• labor requirements well underestimated

Although organizations have done much in the last few years to lift project success rates, they still have a long way to go. Managing projects well is a difficult skill to learn and often takes many years to develop. If you are a novice project manager, here are the key factors that you will need to keep uppermost in your mind if you do not want your project to end up on your organization’s scrap heap.

1. At the beginning of your project, search out a project sponsor who will be committed to your project. Make sure that they have sufficient authority in your organization and command respect, as you will be relying on them to help your project over the obstacles that are put before you.

2. Gather your project team early to brainstorm who are the main stakeholders of your project. Your stakeholders hold the power to push through or steamroll your project, so communicate with them all the way through your project timeline. Write up a communication plan that will guide you in your communications with each stakeholder group throughout.

3. What will be the indicators that show you and the stakeholders that your project has indeed succeeded? Get your sponsor, your project team and the major stakeholders together in the same room to thrash out these measures of success. This will get all parties singing from the same hymn sheet.

4. Plan for how you will plan and execute your project. What will be the major deliverables at the output of each project phase? How will handoffs occur? What will be the key decision points? What methods will you use for managing risks and issues and reviewing project progress?

5. Allocate project tasks clearly and unambiguously to each project team member. For larger projects, use scheduling software that manages the interdependencies between tasks. Meet with your project team regularly to review the schedule and to reassign tasks when necessary.

6. Avoid scope creep and the insidious damage that this can do to projects by monitoring and reviewing each proposed change to the project deliverables. Assess the impact on the project’s budget, quality requirements and timeline before approving changes.

7. Keep on top of the risks that can threaten to sink your project. Initially, get with your team to brainstorm the potential threats to your project and plan for minimizing their impact in case the risk events do happen. Also, keep track of issues as they arise and communicate these to everyone that is or could be affected.

8. Ensure that all plans, designs, charters, meeting minutes, and so on, are documented to the appropriate level. Smaller projects will require less documentation. The extent to which you document should be a balance between using time and labor efficiently and minimizing project risk. Make sure that your team understands the documentation requirements up front.

9. At project completion, evaluate your project’s performance. Using the success indicators you developed at the start, assess whether the project was within budget and on schedule and whether the products and services delivered were to the agreed quality standards. Discuss the project’s scorecard with all those involved with the project. What did you learn for next time?

10. Look at the soft measures of success in addition to the hard measures mentioned in the previous point. Gather the major stakeholders together with your team members for a meeting. Openly and honestly discuss what they thought of the project. How did they feel about their level of inclusion? Did they feel that the project was a success in their view? Answers to these questions will reveal your likelihood of success in your next project as you gauge the quality of the working relationships you and your team developed throughout the project’s life. What can you learn from this that you can apply to your next project?

As the world inside and outside of organizations becomes more complex, getting the right project outcomes will require a broader and deeper skill set. Are you up to the challenge? By learning the lessons from past failed projects and through applying the ten key success factors outlined in this article, you will be well on the way to earning the respect of everyone depending on your project.

© Leslie Allan. All rights reserved.