Generic Project Success and Project Management Success Criteria and Factors: Literature Review and Survey

摘要

This paper covers a thorough literature review on "Project Success" and "The Generic Project Success Criteria and Factors". In recent times, it has become a common belief that project success is defined by meeting the time, cost and quality requirements of organizations. However, there are some important project success criteria (PSCs) and factors (PSFs) which often get neglected when it comes to evaluating a project. The results of a survey, conducted by the researchers, show that to the contrary of what is mentioned in the literature, "Top Management Support" turned out to be the most important measure of project success. "Time" and "Quality" and their process, on the other hand, were not considered as critical success criteria. In fact, a controversial discovery is that some so called project success factors could potentially be considered as criteria for evaluating projects. This paper suggests the necessity of further investigations on the discrepancy between theoretical project success criteria and factors and those considered important in industry. In fact, the paper's authors believe that this controversy occurs because projects' stakeholders have different definitions of project success. Moreover, the survey presents a balance between the numbers of respondents who believe that project success is deemed project management success and the respondents, who consider that this is not necessarily true.