AN ESSAY ON
PROJECT SUCCESS DEFINED BY SUCCESS FACTORS AND SUCCESS
CRITERIA
by M. Shaw
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm

Winston Churchill
INTRODUCTION
1.

Since the 1960s there have been an increasing number of Project Management

scholars that have expressed concerns regarding the ways to manage the success or failure of a project. Crawford (2000) theorised that there are two major avenues of thought in this area being: how success is judged and the factors that contribute to the success. These two avenues were later crowned ‘success factors’ and ‘success criteria’ respectively of which both will be discussed in depth during this essay to provide an insight for …show more content…

These areas in a house project for example are criteria that improve the socioeconomic factors of the community around the actual house. Thus this project could use improved gardens or visual impacts of the housing project that will improve the community’s view of the suburb rather than just that particular site. These secondary and tertiary impacts provide success criteria for the project. Furthermore in the acquisition of a new aircraft for military the stakeholder community benefits that could be used as success criteria could be the level of host nation employment or involvement to improve their knowledge base.
Thus whilst it may not improve the actual new aircraft it will allow the host nation to build the aircraft themselves next time that that nation wishes to purchase a new aircraft. SUCCESS FACTORS
8.

Since the late 1960’s Project Management scholars have been trying to establish

the factors that lead to project success (Baker, 1988) (Pinto, 1988) (Lechler, 1988), which have led to conclusions being published for project management practitioners.
Despite decades of research and countless articles being written (Kloppenborg, 2000)
(Morris, 1994) projects continue to disappoint stakeholders (O’Connor and
Reinsborough 1992) (Standish Group, 1995) (Cooke-Davies, 2000). So what factors actually lead to successful projects? Cooke-Davies (2002) states that project success

5 factors are based upon answering three separate