Project Success - Part 4 - Reasons to be Cheerful

IMPROVING THE LIKELIHOOD OF SUCCESS

Wrapping up this series on Project Success I want to revisit some of the earlier themes and identify what you as the Project Manager or Project Owner can do to enhance the likelihood your project being judged a success.

We have already identified in previous entries that a key theme of success is to understand what type of project the organization is initiating or selecting.  

Organizations tend to opt for simplistic assessments of project type. They often equate difficulty of their projects based on size

• how big the scope is
• how large a budget will be required
• estimated time / duration for the project
• team, etc... 

They use $ and estimated counts to categorize their projects and it is true that bigger projects have a higher risk of failure. However, while size of project brings its own set of unique challenges, the real issues that drive the difficulty of projects are:

• complexity in the solution, and the stakeholder relationships
• uncertainty of requirements, or in the project environment
• urgency of delivery

These issues bring an order of magnitude increase in the difficulty of a project, well above the challenges of a large big project.