Success Criteria

Success of failure? How to appraise a project or a product? 

The project success criteria is a set of measurable objectives to be met by the project to be considered a success. It is too naive to consider only “within budget” and/or “within schedule”. When the criteria is coarse, the failure rate goes up and we face ludicrous assertions such as “70-80% of projects fail”.

Timing is critical: The sooner the Project/Product Manager establishes what is important to evaluate efforts, the easier will be to negotiate for personnel, resources and funding.

Product success is usually measured by their sales figures but this is not always desirable if the organisation is in a market discovery process. The product-market fit, reflects the matching between product characteristics and market preferences, translates well into sales. To evaluate the product in itself, a score may be created to emphasize the learning acquired. We present an example of score calculation later.

How to express the judgement criteria?

“We only get what we measure” is a piece of wisdom not to be ignored. Success factors should be stated in objective terms such as:

1. the product should contain 4 ways to search information (by name, author, creation date or publish date )
2. the product should be completed by 14 January 2021 (fixed deadline)
3. the product should be operational between 3 to 4 months and fully completed within 6 months
4. the prototype should cost in the range U$ 18,000 to U$ 23,000

In predictive projects success criteria tend to be determined in terms of deliverables, time and cost.

In agile projects success success criteria tend to be tied to outcomes and the value generated by the product.

How to combine multiple criteria?

When multiple criteria must be considered, we can combine them into a single score that can be used to evaluate the project manager skills and the organisation expertise/maturity in projects.

Example: For product X the score is calculated following the rule:

• 40% for user rating measured in the first 3 months in the market when 80% of sales of the App is expected to happen
• 30% for schedule performance as measured by SPI
• 30% for cost performance as measured by CPI

For this criteria the score is calculated as:

• 0.4 x userRating + 0.3 x SPI + 0.3 x CPI

Note: CPI and SPI are KPIs provided by EVA.