Project management success

Attempts to maximize the PM success rate are sometimes called “the quest for the Holy Grail as it is an object of a continuous research of all project managers. This rate is a key performance indicator which characterizes the grade of project’s success – these metrics show how well and precisely the project’s pre-planned objectives were fulfilled. It and failures are concepts that were thoroughly studied over the years to find out their common backgrounds and drivers in order to design universal guidance to disclose, forecast and prevent defective tendencies, and to replicate and promote success drivers. There are some tactics to reach wins and avoid failures, let’s study them in this article:

• success criteria – you should definitely formulate and state what the necessary success level includes. You should know a success level that is sufficient to qualify your project as generally successful – in other words you need to outline certain key objectives that are an absolute must for your project. You should divide your project goals as primal and secondary ones (along with categorizing all goals by their impact), so that you can concentrate at attainment of the major results, while sacrifice some secondary objectives (when impossible to meet them) for the sake of the principal ones.

• failure criteria – you should define what actually means to fail in your case. Reasoning from your project’s objectives and their impact rating you should determine something called “admissible level of failure”. For example, you could foresee a situation when only the highly-impacting objectives are reached within a given project time and resources, while some other key and secondary goals are missed due to valid impossibility of completing them before the appointed deadline and within allocated resources.
• factors – these factors are areas where you should reach the best possible concentration of organizational and labour resources. These factors are previously mentioned “ drivers” as it’s assumed that if these factors are robust enough, then your project will be driven to its success “automatically”. They may include key elements such as project plan, project team, project facilities, etc. However, these ones are very general examples; in practice these drivers could be much more specific, industrial and strongly aligned with the real project’s objectives.

• previous experience – the good source of learning some possible managerial solutions are project management success stories that can tell you how different managers have resolved certain problems they faced while administering their projects, so that you can replicate or take on board some part of their experience in overcoming different obstacles. If you have some opportunity to learn from project management success case study similar to yours, then you shouldn’t miss this chance to avoid possible issues beforehand.
• statistics – of course, don’t forget about usual statistics. There is some statistical information available on what is average success rate for projects of your type and industry. If success rate is quite low, then study why it is so, probably some macroeconomic factors underlie this.

Software

In order to reach project’s success, it’s just necessary to keep accurate control over project time, costs, budget and other resources to make sure that all situational shortages are properly covered with some achievements better than planned, or with some reserves. There is a good example of software that can help you to coordinate your team’s efforts and resources around the project objectives – it is called VIP Task Manager. It provides you with rich capabilities for effective tasks- and time-oriented project management in terms of multiuser collaboration.