Have you ever been struck with a great idea for a project only to realize too late that it was a total bust? It’s a devastating experience many entrepreneurs, companies, and passionate individuals struggle with.
Project failure can leave you feeling absolutely frustrated. You lose money, waste time, and consume valuable resources. With so much at stake, it’s difficult to get back up on your feet and give a new project another shot.
But before you decide to throw in the towel and head back to your comfort shell, here’s an idea for you: What if you can take extra steps to ensure your project will succeed? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to work on a project you know has a good chance of bringing in the results you want?
While it’s impossible to predict a project’s success 100%, you can take certain steps to ensure a project is heading in the right direction. With smart preparation and planning, you’d be able to save yourself from scope creep, missed deadlines, lack of support, and other project failures you’re often tormented with.
Here are 7 key factors of a successful project and why you should strive to meet each step, even before you begin managing and launching your next big idea.
1. A validated idea
Many projects begin with a shiny idea we assume would grab the hearts of our customers right off the bat. Once that idea begins to dull, we lose enthusiasm, hope, and the will to carry on with the project.
Instead of jumping at the next sparkle that may flit before your eyes, validate if the idea is profitable, valuable to your target customers, and necessary to the business. Test your idea by doing the necessary market and industry research. See if people respond positively to your idea before proposing it to the executives.
2. Solid goals that bring value to the business
A successful project has solid goals in place that bring value to the business. You know exactly what you should be aiming for and what you need to do to achieve those results.
With clear goals in place that are sure to take the business forward, it becomes a lot easier for you to create and present a strategic project plan that will ultimately win the support of your stakeholders.
3. Clear objectives and requirements
Having concrete goals in place is more than just motivation and hopeful dreams. They enable you to visualize, plan, and document clear objectives and requirements that will clear the path for smart and effective project management.
We’ve talked extensively about having clear objectives as a key factor to project management success, emphasizing how it adds clarity and direction and keeps the project scope from ballooning out of control. That being said, you’ll want to flesh out your core objectives before getting busy with your project proposals.
4. Concrete project milestones
At this point, you have a working project plan based on your core objectives and the value it can bring for the business. With a sure hand and a clear vision, you can set concrete project milestones and reasonable deadlines that make sense and fit well with your scope.
With milestones in place, it’s now easier to meet deadlines and to deliver the goods on time and on budget. These two are crucial to project management success, so it pays to keep these in mind every step of the way.
5. Flexible action steps that respond to risk
As much as we’d like to prevent our projects from screwing up, anything can happen along the way that could set your project back.
What you can do is be aware of the possible project management risks you may encounter. A risk assessment enables you to calculate the likelihood and severity of potential project risks so you can devise flexible action steps that effectively respond to and address issues that may crop up.
6. Every person in your team is in it for the long run
Team satisfaction. Without it, project closure becomes a distant dream and the entire project management experience leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
For your project to succeed, you need to make sure every person on the team is in it for the long run. For this to work, both you and your team members must believe in the success of your project and experience quality results from the work that you do, not to mention have a little fun in between.
7. Your stakeholders’ utmost support
At the heart of every successful project is authentic commitment and support from your stakeholders. But to get them revved up and win their trust, you’ll need to provide them with the information they need to know exactly what this project can do and why it matters.
You can already tell that the 6 key factors are the steps you need to get to this point. With a validated idea, goals that aim to bring in value, clear objectives and project milestones, flexibility towards risk, and 100% support from your team, you can now stand and propose your project with confidence and faith in its success.
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8 Factors That Lead to Successful Projects
Hannah Donato · January 19, 2022 · Updated July 21, 2022
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The world is changing fast, but when it comes to managing successful projects, many things stay tried and true. Ultimately, you want to foster a powerhouse project team that’s focused on objectives and responsive to new information. Here are eight key factors that can help make a project successful.
Clear Project Goals and Objectives
To achieve success, it has to be clear what the project success criteria are. Before starting, help your team understand what you want to achieve — not just for your project but also for your client’s business or community.
Align with relevant stakeholders on your key performance indicators (KPIs), and if possible, keep them visible. As you arrive at critical decision points, go back to these goals to determine the best courses of action.
Diligent Research and Data Gathering
One of the most important project success factors is the discovery phase, when project managers work closely with clients to gain more insight into their problems, industry, past initiatives, capabilities, and more. This will equip you with information to formulate better strategies and anticipate possible hurdles.
When projects start, it’s tempting to jump the gun and get to work. It’s exciting while you’re brimming with ideas. Plus, a quick and straightforward schedule can impress stakeholders.
However, it’s important to remember that the benefits of forgoing this critical stage are only temporary, and will quickly be eclipsed by their downsides. If you want to increase your chances of success, don’t skip the discovery phase!
Grounded Estimates and Plans
Unrealistic estimates and lofty promises are the most common ways project teams set themselves up for project failure. It can be tempting to give small, aggressive estimates because they seem to define the team members’ competence. But if you want to increase your project’s chance of success, you and your team may have to learn to set this ego aside or work around it.
Consider using good planning methods like planning poker, where discussions are encouraged around estimates. Look into your best, worst, and most realistic scenarios. Add padding and contingencies as needed. Conduct project planning according to how things are, not how you want things to be.
Optimized Workflow and Systems
Systems and workflows are set processes for your team to follow when implementing your project plans. They’re efficient ways to set expectations and manage communication. They also minimize confusion, which can be massively beneficial during the busiest phases.
Take the time to evaluate your workflow and system after critical phases of your project to spot inefficiencies. Check in with your team and stakeholders to identify areas you can automate and optimize project management strategies.
Barring extreme situations, it’s not advisable to do major overhauls in the middle of a project. Still, keep an eye on tweaks that can offer tremendous results.
Real-Time Progress and Resource Tracking
Once you start executing project tasks, you’ll have a natural tendency to focus only on what’s at hand. But as the project manager, it’s your responsibility to keep your goals and project objectives in view. Without this presence of mind, you risk wasting resources and missing deadlines.
Nowadays, project management software is equipped with features for real-time task tracking and reporting, productivity monitoring, budget management and cost tracking, and more. Maximizing these features can enable you and your team to spot bottlenecks, foresee issues and delays, and stay in touch with your big objectives as you make incremental project progress.
Scope, Change, and Priority Management
With the rise of information overload, it can be tempting for teams and stakeholders to implement every new idea and iterate after every exciting insight. While project management methodologies such as Agile Scrum exist to welcome new findings and iterations, these iterations should still come with thorough discernment and evaluation.
Finding the balance between openness to new ideas and firmness against scope creep is critical for project managers. While change can be good, new changes in scope have to be evaluated against the project’s objectives and the availability of resources. Keep priorities clear to help your team manage their efforts — so they don’t go to waste.
Healthy Team Culture
If you’ve ever wondered how self-managing teams exist, then you’ve already stumbled upon the importance of healthy team culture.
A team’s culture defines what they consider normal and unusual. This influences their decisions and actions, regardless of whether they’re being supervised by management. Safety, empowerment, and accountability create a breeding ground for collaboration, constructive feedback, problem-solving, initiative, and grit.
Successfully maintaining this can help your team perform optimally, even when they’re left to their own devices.
Documentation and Knowledge Management
Another critical success factor in project management is constant improvement. In order for actions and decisions to be reviewed, they have to first be properly documented. Documentation can feel like an extra administrative task for project managers. But done right, it has many benefits.
Proper documentation and knowledge management can help you trace your team’s thought process. You can use this to communicate better with stakeholders, onboard new team members, and conduct object evaluations at the end of your project. Leveraging your previous findings in future projects is also made possible when these are adequately recorded.
Finally, documenting your project success can increase your team’s credibility and help you acquire more clients moving forward.
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A Solid Foundation Is Key to Project Success
The key to building an agile and productive team is providing a solid foundation with sound systems and values. This firm grounding in project management will empower project team members to explore new ideas, take risks, and ultimately succeed and innovate.
Conditions for Project Success
PM’s Conditions for Project Success is a series of independent research that seeks to identify the core factors which lead to the successful delivery of projects, programmes and portfolios.
The Dynamic Conditions for Project Success 2021 report builds on the Conditions for Project Success 2015 findings and can be used at an organisational level to set up projects for success from the outset.
In 2015, we published a report which sought to identify the core factors which lead to project success. These conditions, subject to the situation and the judgement of the project professional, can be implemented with any project, programme or portfolio and help to best ensure project success. However, despite widespread usage we identified at the end of this research that dynamic conditions at the organisational, professional, and socio-economic levels existed that could help to shape successful project-based organisations.
With this in mind and through a commissioned tender we sought with the Universities of Sussex and Southampton to further develop the findings of the 2015 report by investigating these organisational, professional, and socio-economic dynamic conditions that can enhance project outcomes.
Dynamic conditions for project success
The research discovered nine new dynamic conditions to help achieve project, organisational, and professional success. These are:
1. Interpersonal skills 2. Training and certifications 3. Team ethos 4. Technology and data 5. Contracts 6. Knowledge management 7. Agility 8. Sustainability 9. Diversity
Who is the intended audience?
The research would primarily be of interest to all project based organisations and professionals. However, the findings are relevant to anyone with an interest in the successful delivery of projects, programmes or portfolios.
Why is it important?
The study highlights opportunities for project management organisations and professionals to improve project success and project outcomes, including prioritising informal mentoring, improving data analysis and decision making with technology and AI, and establishing knowledge management roles for more effective learning from past projects.
For project professionals, this work advises on specific mindsets and activities that can help to support and develop their teams. These activities can help to ensure that their projects create a legacy that can underpin long-term organisational success.
Who took part in the research?
The research team gathered the data using a systematic literature review, interviews with a cross-section of 37 project professionals, and a survey that attracted a total of 1,015 responses. The analysis identified nine dynamic conditions drawn from the relevant academic literature and refined through the research process.
What are the main challenges?
This report is separate from the 2015 Conditions for Project Success on the basis that the study examined primarily non-project related factors that nonetheless can affect project success.
This study occurred under unprecedented circumstances amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. All aspects of the study took place entirely virtually; this served to shape the responses from the project management community.
Where can I read more?
What did you discover?
The dynamic conditions reflect the activity and changes in both the project profession and the wider environment. Sustainability is now high on the UK government’s policy agenda, influencing how large organisations in the UK and abroad set and monitor sustainability standards for their projects.
Leadership skills and training to support the development of that training is becoming even more important with a sharp focus on project data and analytics and leadership standards. Similar arguments have been proposed for the rest of the conditions included in this report arguing that project professionals might be missing a strategic opportunity not considering them while formulating their project plans, teams, and day-to-day operations.
The nine dynamic conditions found were:
Interpersonal skills Interpersonal skills allow project professionals to engage with stakeholders, build and lead teams, and the generic skills and responsibilities of being a project professional. This includes leadership, emotional intelligence, and communication skills.
Training and certification Training and certifications describe the requirement for any professional to continually develop their competence. This can take two forms: formal training courses underwritten by qualifications and accreditations by professional organisations or broader informal learning processes such as mentoring and exploring the latest research findings.
Team ethos Team ethos comprises the values shared amongst project team members including a commitment to respect, transparency, open and honest communication, working collaboratively, and building trust.
Technology and data Technology and data in project management concerns identifying and using the correct digital tools to manage and complete projects. More complex concepts include project data analytics as an area of competitive advantage.
Contracts Contracts are agreements made between two or more parties that create legally binding obligations between them. The contract sets out those obligations and the actions that can be taken if they are not met.
Knowledge management Knowledge management can be defined as the organisational activities that facilitate the creation, storage, sharing, and application of knowledge collectively held within the organisation. It allows individuals, projects, and organisations to share tacit knowledge to disseminate best practice and prevent repeat mistakes.
Agility Agility is a broad set of principles encompassing many development methodologies for iterative and incremental developments throughout the life cycle. This helps organisations respond to changing requirements and situations.
Sustainability Sustainability in the project management context balances the environmental, social, economic, and administrative aspects of project-based working to meet the current needs of stakeholders without compromising or overburdening future generations.
Diversity Projects are increasingly made up of individuals with different backgrounds, abilities, and ways of working. These differences create value, and diverse teams can bring about higher performance because of different experiences and perspectives. There can also be a strong sense of inclusion and community when people of different backgrounds and abilities come together for a common purpose.
Conditions for project success
The research identified 12 success factors, otherwise known as APM’s framework for success. From this, five factors were found to have ‘the strongest and most consistent relationship’ with the traditional measures of project success: time, cost and quality. These were:
1. Project planning and review
2. Goals and objectives
3. Effective governance
4. Competent project teams
What Makes a Project Successful?
For project managers and organizations responsible for projects, the question of what makes a project successful is almost an existential question, a question of why we get up every morning and go to work.
And yet it’s often said that most projects fail. I’ve wondered what data and evaluation criteria are used to support this claim.
One of the most quoted proponents of the “most projects fail” thesis seems to be the Standish Group, which happens to focus on IT projects. The numbers are pretty miserable by their measures: Less than half of all IT projects are successful.
But if that’s true, why do all of us project managers (title or function) still have our jobs? How could the news be that bad without fundamental reform of the entire field of project management?
I can think of two explanations, and though they might sound like “the dog ate my homework” excuses, please bear with me for a moment.
The first is that failure is baked-in to projects. PMI defines a project as, “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result.” In other words, they’re inventions, experiments, and even aspirations. Experiments are done precisely because you don’t know the results. Or another way to say it is that uncertainty is an essential attribute of projects – you can’t have one without the other.
Second, it could be that the “most projects fail” studies are a bit myopic. They tend to measure only “efficiency” factors, like schedule and budget. Can you exceed your budget or schedule constraints and still have a successful project? Some say “yes.”
There’s a lot of literature about project success, but the article I’ll refer to here is “Project Success: A Multidimensional Strategic Concept” (Shenhar, Dvir, Levy, and Maltz). In their view, “project efficiency” is just one of four dimensions of project success. The others are:
Once the project is completed, however, the importance of this dimension [efficiency] starts to decline. As time goes by, it matters less and less whether the project met its original resources constraints—in most cases, after about one year, it is completely irrelevant.
So there is such a thing as a project that is a successful failure – it failed its budget or schedule goals but was, overall, a strategic success for the organization. Much more could (and has) been said about this topic. But for now let’s go back to the snickering I heard earlier about this being a “dog ate my homework” excuse, or a doctor’s note for poor project management.
It’s still the PM’s most pressing responsibility to manage efficiency of the project, and there’s no excuse for not taking that responsibility seriously. But we have to keep it in perspective: the success question isn’t settled on “go-live” day, and we shouldn’t lose sight of the medium and long-term when pondering the project manager’s most existential question.
What Makes Successful Project | 7 – Steps to Ensure Project Success
Steps to Successful Project Launch:- Starting a project can look like a road full of pitfalls. Be well organized to plan your project launch as efficiently as possible. To help you, compare the project launch to the construction of a house. If you start by trying to lay the roof and the windows, without building the foundations and the walls, you will not get anywhere.
7 – Steps to Successful Project Launch
A project is built step by step by following the steps in order, without rushing and with a competent team. Here are seven steps to successfully launch your project.
How many floors will your house be? What will be the number of pieces? How many windows? To build the home of your dreams, you need accurate plans. The same is true for a project.
What is your vision of the project? What are your expectations and goals?
You must clearly and precisely define your project. Your expectations must be realistic and accurate. A concrete vision makes it possible to adapt to the vagaries and the unexpected. So that you and your team know in which direction you are going, determine which are:
It is this clear vision of the project that will generate the support, loyalty and involvement of your project team.
For the construction of your home, you need qualified people to carry out the various tasks: a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter, a mason, etc
In project management, it’s the same thing. As a project manager, you are the conductor and you need people with different skills to carry out your project.
Do not forget that the team thus formed will work together until the end of the project. Together, the members of the team will have good times, but also difficult moments of stress and tension. A good understanding within the team is therefore essential for a better collaboration and the guarantee of success of your project.
Finally, clearly define the roles and tasks of each: time guardian, budget manager, external relations officer, etc. Also make sure your team is experienced and trained enough.
You have defined your vision and assemble your team; it is time to develop your action plan. To achieve your project, you need a guide to move forward and achieve your goals step by step. The action plan defines a framework, organizes, plans and implements all the means necessary to achieve the objectives set. It is the transformation of your ideas and reflections into concrete and operational elements.
The action plan gives you a global vision of the progress of the project: the tasks to be accomplished, human and financial resources and deadlines. Use the Gantt chart, an excellent planning tool, perfect to visualize the progress of the different tasks to carry out your project.
Do not hesitate to involve your team in the construction of the action plan for a better appropriation of the project. The team needs to know what you want from the start.
A plumber, an electrician, or a mason needs the right tools to do his job properly. In project management, the project manager and his / her collaborators also need the right tools to be efficient and effective.
Excellent communication between the different actors of the project is essential. Today, there are many tools that facilitate communication in particular, and project management in general. This is the case for collaborative project management software.
Monitoring and coordination of project development, centralization of information, simplification of exchanges, transparency and visibility … Their advantages are many. They promote collaborative work and save you time.
To achieve your goal, you can choose different methods of project management. There are two main categories:
In conventional methods, you and your team work on the whole project by following the customer’s specifications. You commit yourself to a precise schedule that leaves little (or no) room for unforeseen events and changes. It is as if, after having chosen your house on plan, you recover the keys once it is finished, without ever having visited the site.
In Agile methods, interaction with the client is more important. The project is divided into mini-projects which are validated by the client. Contingencies and changes are possible and the client can evolve his project as he goes along.
Not only do you follow the construction of your home, but additionally, you can change elements along the way. The agile method is one of the trends to follow in 2017.
In project management, teamwork is the key element that determines the success or failure of a project. So managing your team is important, knowing how to make the best of it is essential.
Be sure to maintain the motivation of your team throughout the duration of the project. To do this, you need to build up membership. Your employees must share a common vision and feel that their skills will be used wisely. It is therefore important that everyone knows how it contributes to the overall goal. Finally, pay attention to each member of your team: identify their needs and acknowledge the effort.
Do not overlook the important stage of the end-of-project review. With your team, take the time to take stock of the project: what are the good practices to remember and the mistakes to avoid. Review the results and listen to feedback from your staff. Make a list of what worked and what did not work. This will help you avoid making mistakes in future projects.
In Summary
The launch of a project is not improvised, but is preparing carefully. Be organized, surround yourself with a competent team and know how to keep it motivated, arm yourself with effective tools and choose your method of project management. Follow these seven steps for a successful project launch.
