When a project ends, many project teams struggle with whether they were really successful or not. Knowing how a project ended compared to its deadline and budget only tells part of the story. If a project team delivers a poor quality product on time and within budget, it still should not be viewed as a success. On the flip side, if quality is extremely important, the sponsor may consider the project a success if the deliverables meet the quality criteria, even if the project was also late and over budget.
The term “scorecard” is used to describe the criteria that determine whether the project was a success or not. The term “balanced scorecard” refers to having a rounded set of success criteria that take into account a number of different aspects of delivering a solution. Scorecards allow you to establish and gain agreement on the important criteria that signify how successful a project is.
Once you start thinking about your success criteria, however, there is an important factor to consider. The more you strive for accuracy and objectivity in your success criteria, the more complex and time consuming the data gathering and interpretation will become. Let’s look at ways to gauge overall project success, starting at the very simple and moving toward the more complex.
Simple Sponsor Survey – Yes or No
Perhaps the simplest way to know if you were successful is to simply ask the client sponsor whether the project was a success or not. This is the most direct and the sponsor is usually the person who ultimately must judge success. The sponsor would take into account the budget, deadline, quality, etc., and also make a mental determination of which criteria was most important.
And there you have it - a straight "yes" or "no" from the sponsor to the question of whether or not the project was a success. All or nothing! What can be simpler?
Allow a Range of Survey Answers
The problem with the simple "yes" or "no" answer is that it is black or white (all or nothing) and does not leave any room for shades of gray. Usually the sponsor will be happy about how some things turned out and disappointed in other things. The sponsor may not be willing to be slotted into a simple "yes" or "no" answer.
A method that allows more options is to still ask one question, but allow the answer to be expressed in a range. For example, you can ask the sponsor "How satisfied were you with the overall success of the project?" and allow them to express their answer on a one through five scale (or one through ten). Now the sponsor has some discretion. If they are totally satisfied, they can score the project a five out of five. If they were happy about most things, but unhappy about some, they can rate the team a four out of five. This allows the sponsor to provide a little more of a gray area, while still keeping things very simple.
More Comprehensive Survey
You will probably discover that asking one question is just not enough, especially if you want to validate that certain specific behaviors are taking place. To gather more feedback, your survey just needs to have more than one question. Instead, you break overall success into a number of components. For instance, you may have multiple questions that ask, on a scale from one to five, how satisfied the individual was with:
How the team communicated
- Whether the deliverables produced were of high quality
-
Whether the team responded in a timely manner
- Whether the team was knowledgeable in the business area
- Etc.
This survey can also be completed by a wider range of people. You could ask the sponsor and a number of other impacted stakeholders to provide feedback.
Adding Multiple Success Criteria
Of course, these survey metrics do not have to stand on their own. You can combine them with other basic information regarding budget and deadline to determine the overall success of the project. As an example, the team may have been within 5% of budget and hit its deadline. They may also receive an overall consolidated 4.1 out of 5.0 on the survey. The question then is whether this is a success or not. There is certainly much more information available. However, in addition to setting the success criteria, the project team must also establish a reasonable target number. For the budget and deadline, this probable means that you completed the project within your estimates – plus or minus your tolerance levels. For survey results, you could establish a target level, for instance, an average of 3.5 on a five-part scale.
This leads us to one more level of complexity. If you have multiple success criteria, how do you combine them all together? If you were utilizing cost, delivery date and a client survey, how do you know what is most important. If your deadline was extremely important, for instance, you may find that the project was successful if it hit the deadline, even if it was over budget. This gets into the area of weighting the scorecard success criteria.
Make Sure You Have Client Agreement as Well
The project team and the client must agree on the overall scorecard ahead of time. You do not want to be in a position where the project team is declaring success at the end of a project, but the client feels the project was unsuccessful. If you have an agreement on the scorecard, both the project team and the business client should have common expectations in terms of overall project success.
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