When a project ends, many project teams struggle to
determine whether they were successful. Knowing how a project ended in terms of
its deadline and budget tells only part of the story. If a project team delivers
a poor-quality product on time and within budget, it still should not be seen 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.
To help determine the success of a project, you can use a scorecard that takes into account the criteria that need to be met for the project to be a success. Scorecards allow you to establish and gain agreement on the important criteria that determine a project’s success. Here’s how to use scorecards in your project success measurements and what issues to resolve early in the scorecard process.
First of two parts
This is the first installment of a two-part series that shows you how to assess whether your project was successful. This first part introduces you to the scorecard process, while the second part will focus on the issues you will encounter when trying to add multiple success criteria to your scorecard.
Ask the client sponsor
Perhaps the simplest way to know whether your team was successful is to simply ask your client’s sponsor. The sponsor would take into account the budget, deadline, quality, and so on, make a mental determination of which criteria were more important, and offer a straight "yes" or "no" response.
The problem with this approach is that it offers the sponsor only a black or white response with no shades of gray. Generally, the sponsor will be happy about how some things turned out and disappointed with other aspects. Because of this, the sponsor may not be willing to be slotted into a simple "yes" or "no" answer.
At the last company where I worked, we started off with this approach for our small enhancement projects. We asked the requesting clients (sponsors) whether they were happy with the results. Seems simple enough, right? What I soon found was that this simple question placed a burden on the client. They always answered “yes,” they were happy. However, I knew that they weren’t always. This question was not giving them enough options.
To work around this problem, you can still ask just one question but allow the answer to be expressed in a range. For example, you can ask your sponsors, "How satisfied were you with the overall success of the project?" and allow them to express their answers on a scale of five to one. This gives sponsors some discretion. If they were 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 sponsors to provide more shades of gray, while still keeping things simple.
In real life
We took this approach at my last company after realizing that the “yes” or “no” approach was not working. This time we let the clients answer on a scale of one to five. Much of the feedback was still a five, but there were some fours and threes as well, which gave us a better idea of the overall success of the project as well as areas where we needed to improve.
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