The Most Valuable Business Lesson I Ever Learned: How to Define Success
When you run a marathon, success is finishing, whether first or last place. When you climb Everest, success is making it back home in more or less one piece. When you raise children, success is… well, it depends on the day.
The definition of success varies with our goals. Oftentimes, we think of a project as a success when it comes in on time and on budget (or under in one or both categories). But that is only one indicator of success and, as it turns out, it’s not necessarily the best one either. When do we know if a project is really “successful”? What does that mean?
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How does the client feel? Thirty years ago, we would walk in, deliver on time, and walk back out. We didn’t look at the people impact or the ecosystem in which the project was to work. This, however, is crucial:
- What are you delivering? To whom?
- How are they going to use it?
- Are end users going to be successful?
- Are people trained, able to carry on when we leave?
Success is More Than Tick Boxes; It is More Than Delivering on Time and on Budget
Oftentimes, though, that is the metric used. But if you go back six months after a project is completed, everything could be in shambles because no one knows how to benefit from the project you delivered. They did not adopt the business processes or methodologies required because they are not understood or there aren’t enough people to implement the project on an ongoing basis.
To determine if a project has, in fact, been successful, we need to ask:
- Are we in a better place now than when we started the project?
- Are we looking at the whole ecosystem, not at the project as an isolated entity?
- Are people happy?
- Are they trained?
- Do they have the new business processes they need, and do they understand them?
- Do they know why they’re doing what they’re doing?
If teams are effective and efficient, both the team and the sponsors will be happy. It shows up in productivity as well as customer and employee morale. These are the factors that CFOs and CEOs look at. If we can make those people successful, productive, and engaged, that is the real definition of project success.
