Project Management Best Practice 5 – Define Success First

Projects and the organizations supporting them share a key characteristic; they both deploy human, financial, and material resources to achieve defined goals. So like organizations, projects must have specific goals against which the project manager’s decisions and team member actions are focused. Like mission measures, results-based project goals should be defined before work begins and refined as scope and/or circumstances change. Only when this occurs can a project be effectively managed and efficiently completed.[wcm_restrict plans=”41104, 25542, 25653″]

‘Bring Me a Rock’ Projects

Shouldn’t a project’s specific goals and objects be defined within its scope document?

They should be. They frequently aren’t.

All too often a project’s scope document provides only general ‘pie-in-the-sky’ guidelines or targets for the project manager to meet. These vague project goals can be so non-specific that they could apply to almost any project; leaving so much up to individual presumption and judgment that decisions become difficult to evaluate and challenge. Under these circumstances, project managers tend to fall back on project performance measures, typically project cost and schedule adherence, to determine overall project success rather than the project’s resulting organizational impact.

Final Thought…

As amazing as this might sound, vague project goals have been applied to projects ranging from the thousands of dollars to the hundreds of millions of dollars to the billions of dollars. The lack of specific, time-bound project outcomes plagues project managers and their organizations not because a project is too small or too large for properly defined goals but because of insufficient planning discipline applied during the initiative’s formative stages. Thus, defining success first is a management best practice, not an administrative one. By exercising good management during the project scope definition process, the organization can avoid creating and discarding several undesirable rocks.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember plans=”41104, 25542, 25653″]

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