Measuring Project Success 

There are many ways or criteria for measuring project success or failure. The most basic or foundational one being whether a project was delivered on time and on budget. However, as most projects are seldom delivered on time and on budget, most projects would fail on such singular metrics.  For a broader and more complete measure or yardstick for measuring project success or failure, listed below is a comprehensive list of additional measurement criteria that can be used as a baseline for measuring and evaluating project success or failure.

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​​Project Success:

• Delivered on-time/on-schedule.

• Delivered on budget.

• Key desired business outcome(s) are achieved and a tight fit of key functional business requirements are met.

• A high level of end-user adoption and satisfaction.

• Minimal to no application customizations.

• Seamless and highly functional system integration.

• Minimal production issues are experienced at both production cut-over as well as on-going.

• Minimal post production support is required.

Project Failure:

• Late/Behind planned delivery date.

• Over budget i.e.

  • Underestimated complexity.

  • Significant unmanaged scope creep.

  • Many  implementation change orders. 

• Key business outcome(s) are not met or achieved.

• Major functional business requirement gaps and business needs are not met.

• Minimal end-user adoption uptake and general user dissatisfaction.

• Poor functional system integration exists.

• Poor/Inaccurate/Incomplete data conversions.

• Many issues are experienced at production cutover and ongoing.

• Numerous application customizations were implemented

• On-going post production support is needed by both internal and external resources.