What is your idea of a successful project characterised by?

I’ll extrapolate some of the ‘objective’ and ’subjective’ points for this discussion. I think it’s important to recognize and acknowledge these two categories of criteria in order to maintain and grow your organizations promises as they pertain to it’s offerings. Objectively - meeting deadlines, completing under budget, (completing at all or in some cases, stopping at the right time), low defect rates, customer financial ROI are all objective type criteria that “contribute” to the success story - if you will. Subjectively - the people factors such as raw emotions pertaining to satisfaction, confidence, delightment, excitement and happiness are equally if not more important than the objective criterias and also contribute to the success story. Scoring high in both these categories, which grows your success story, is critical.

The question beyond ‘my idea of what a successful project is characterized by’ then becomes - how do you measure and properly interpret ’success’ from what you know at the end of the project in terms of money spent, time taken etc. as well as what everyone involved thinks and feels about the project, how it went and what had been delivered? It’s important to be able to tell a good story at the very end.”