How do you measure project success? Focus on Outcomes and Capability Growth
Most of us work on a lot of projects. Projects for customers, internal projects, side projects that engage our interests and help us to grow.
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In the project, the focus is on getting it done. And after it is done, we are on to the next thing. We generally check to make sure that the all the deliverables were actually delivered, especially for client projects, and we sometimes take time to have a good after-action review. But checking off deliverables and after-action reviews are not enough to measure project success. We need a better model.
Once you get beyond checking off deliverables and measuring project profitability what is left?
One place to start is with goals. What were the projects goals? Were they achieved? Goals are not the same as deliverables. The goal is the deeper purpose behind the project. Vendors and clients are always in alignment on deliverables (that is a key part of the statement of work). They do not necessarily share the same goals, although the project is more likely to be successful if there is some overlap. The same is true for the individual project members. They will each have their own goals for the project.
Goals should lead to outcomes. The desired outcomes are different for client and vendor. Clients undertake projects to impact business outcomes. Goals can be high-level and aspirational, “we want to transform our business from being sales and manufacturing driven to being focused on market shaping and customer value creation.” A goal like this will likely have hundreds of associated projects with cascading sub goals. Or the goals can be tactical and operational, “we want to improve server uptime by .001 percent (that is a real goal from a project I observed, and it had many good follow on outcomes).
Vendors also have goals. These are different from those of the client. A vendor will probably want to win more work from the client and may even design or deliver the project to make that more likely (this can be done in benign ways, discovering new client needs as the project is executed, or malign, engineering in obsolescence and the need for future upgrades and support). The project may be a way to build critical new capabilities that will open many new opportunities for the vendor. Or it may be a pure one off, undertaken to generate some cash or keep people employed (one can see this at certain firms that traditionally serve the oil & gas industry and are looking for work in other areas to tide them over).
Goals are not outcomes. Goals are no more than signposts that point towards a direction. They are not the destination; they are not even the journey.
It is important to track and see if projects actually contribute to goals. But it is even more important to track outcomes. These outcomes will sometimes be unexpected, and even unpredictable. Great companies will set aside time several times a year to see map project deliverables and goals to outcomes. Understanding these linkages helps leaders make better investment decisions and to better appreciate the value of the unexpected.
This kind of review is important to individuals as well. In his classic book, The Reflective Practitioner ,Donald Schon showed how high performance professionals spend a lot of time thinking not just about work but about how they do work. All of us need to learn from this.
Because the above discussion is missing the most important outcome of project work: new capabilities.
One of the most important things to capture in a project record is the skills actually applied in the project, how these link to project success and how skills and capabilities have grown over the course of the project.
Tracking this skill growth and mapping skills to outcomes is central to what we are doing at TeamFit. Our goal is to help companies and individuals built the skills and teams needed to drive project success.
Top image is the logo for Success. An innovative British project for carbon capture well worth understanding, replicating and supporting.
