Honeymoon Hangover:
The Happy Beginnings of a Creeping Scope

Project Success Criteria

How will we know that the project has been successful? That question lies at the very core of our ability to manage a project. If we don't know what constitutes success on a project then how can we plan to achieve it and how we measure our progress towards it? It is therefore essential to effective project management that the project begins with a detailed definition of the project's success, one that is shared by all members of the project team and by the project's stakeholders.

Usually there is good reason to believe that the project's desired outcomes have already been well specified. Before the request for proposal (RFP) was released the government project officer undoubtedly performed a stakeholder analysis and from that identified the project's requirements that were then specified as objectives in the RFP. However, the RFP’s formal definition of the project’s objectives might not capture everything that will shape the project’s perceived success. The RFP may also have contained other success criteria in terms
of the project’s operations, schedule, budget, and products. In addition, the contractor's proposal might have offered additonal beneficial features in their proposed approach whose realization will also be a part of the project’s viewed success.

Project success criteria can also arise from the expectations, sometimes unstated, of individual  stakeholders about what project will accomplish and how it will accomplish it. Since these expectations may not be shared by—or even known by— the entire project team they can be  sources of miscommunication, misdirection, and confusion later in the project.

Purposes

The purpose of defining the project's success at the start of the project is to consolidate these various sources of project objectives and expectations into an explicitly detailed statement of what project will accomplish and how. Despite all the efforts of the government project officer and the contractor project manager leading up to the project's start, it is likely that project team members and project stakeholders will have similiar but different ideas about what the project will achieve. It is therefore important that the elements of the project's success are fully defined so that any differences in expectations can be surfaced early and resolved.  This will pave the way for a universally agreed-to standard of the project's success that will provide a solid basis for the project's management.

Uses in Project Management

The criteria of the project’s success, once they’re fully developed, will serve a number of purposes in the management of the project:

• They will clearly specify just what is to be accomplished within the project’s scope, time, and schedule and, by exclusion, what falls outside of the project’s scope. Consensus on this issue will be critical to the project's smooth progress and ultimate success.
• They will serve as a performance baseline for the project’s change management process
• They can help guide project decisions towards the option or course of action that best promotes the success of the project
• They can serve as a basis for measuring and tracking the project’s progress by identifying the key measures of project success that should be monitored and reported.
• They establish a solid basis for measuring project results and developing lessons learned.

Developing Project Success Criteria

The beginning of project should therefore include the full and detailed specification of just what will constitute project success, a specification that should address both project outcomes (what will be done) and operations (how it will be accomplished). It is useful to develop the specification at two levels:

• The definition of project success
• The definition of exceptional project success

The first of these levels establishes what will be considered acceptable project performance. The second level goes beyond the first to include desirable elements that may not be part of the project's formal scope of work. These could include, for example, adjusting certain project milestones to better serve a client need or priority or modifying the project's approach to minimize the support required by the client organization. While these are not necessary for the project to be considered successful, they identify additional features that would increase the project’s benefit to its stakeholders. Defining exceptional performance serves at least two purposes:

• It identifies and documents additional benefits the project could provide, if possible. As circumstances and resources allow, the project manager could look for opportunities during the project for achieving this higher level of performance.
• It allows a clear distinction between things that are required from the project and those that are legitimately desirable but not absolutely required. That distinction establishes a clear boundary for the project's scope in areas where that scope might otherwise tend to expand.

The process of developing the project's definition of success begins with the project manager assembling a draft of that definition in preparation for the project's kickoff meeting for planning conference. To do this, he or she first reviews the procurement documents to pull out the requirements and expectations that are included in those documents. These can be scattered throughout the RFP and its attachments to include not just the data item descriptions of the project's products but also items included in the statement work (in Section B), in the contract award criteria (Section M), or in supporting documents included by reference or as attachments to the RFP. The contractor's proposal may also include further requirements or additional desirable features.

There are a number of ways in which the information captured by the PM can be structured for presentation and discussion at the kickoff meeting. For example, the performance elements can be put in a table organized by such elements as:

• Area of operations (e.g., Technical, Management, Communications/Reporting, Cost)
• Project phase (e.g., Requirements Analysis, Design, Development, Testing, Deployment And Support)
• Major product
• Performance component (Technical, Schedule, Cost, Quality, H R, Communications, Risk, Procurement)
• Other breakout tailored to the project's scope and nature.

However this table is organized, it should identify the specific outcomes that are required within each category in as much detaail as is possible at that point in the project.

In the case of an Award Fee contract, the structure of the success criteria should be built around the contract's Performance Measurement Plan. In fact, once it has been fully developed the project’s success criteria should be able to serve as the standard of project performance for award fee determination.

A graphical tree-like structure, similar to that typically used to display a project’s work breakdown structure (WBS) can be used for smaller and less complex projects or be used at a summary level for larger projects. This has the advantage of showing the overall structure of the success definition and the relationships among its components at the cost of not being able to accommodate much detail.

In preparing for the kickoff meeting the project manager should develop a draft of the project success standard to serve as the point of departure for the discussion and fuller development of the project success standard during the kickoff meeting. That draft will be largely based upon the RFP and the proposal. The proposal’s compliance matrix, which should have been included in the proposal, is a good place to start since it should include a listing of the project's critical requirements, each linked  to the elements of the proposed approach (the process, resources, and schedule for getting it done). 

The project manager may want to expand the project performance standards with known client/stakeholder preferences and “hot buttons” that, while not formally called out as requirements in the RFP, will almost certainly influence their assessment of the project’s success.

The project success elements dealing with the project’s outputs need to be developed only down to the level of the individual products. The next part of the kickoff meeting---developing the product standards—will define the standards of success for each of the individual products.