When defining project success we tend to look for single, measurable criteria of success, e.g. on-budget, on-time and customer satisfaction. These are the most common key performance indicators for showing a successful project. But when a project scores well in two out of three, is the project still a success? Maybe. And if three out of three succeeds, is the project always a success? Maybe not.

Meeting expectations is another way of defining success. This introduces a much broader set of success criteria, since we will have to meet the expectations from our stakeholder, including clients, project sponsors, steering group, end users, teams and individuals. Successfully identifying all our stakeholders, collecting and communicating all expectations requires great communication skills. We might have the most skilled developers, UX designers, the most experienced project sponsor and highly competent steering group, but if we lack communication we will probably never succeed. So a successful project needs clear and open communication.

The foundations for most expensive mistakes are typically made very early, making it essential to start a project with clear scope of defined boundaries, a clearly defined strategy to avoid scope creeping and a clear purpose helping us in our scope containment and change management throughout the project. An engaged project sponsor who provides solid leadership has also been proven to be a true success factor, ensuring that our project meets the overall business objectives.

The engagement from our project sponsor is reflected in the project teams through trust, making trust a core value in our project work. Trusting our project teams will give us strong self-contained teams who will decide together how to solve problems, and how to best collaborate, resulting in collective responsibility for delivering high quality results and a clear shared understanding of where they want to go. Such teams have far better chances of maximizing their learning, adapt to new insights, be effective and stay successful but in addition they will have the courage to undertake even greater challenges.

Whether our project goal is building a new app, publishing a new website, going on a worldwide journey, starting our own flower store, picking up our kids from daycare in time or writing an article about successful projects, meeting expectations is always tough. But no one said running a successful project would be easy.

Good luck succeeding with your project!