Understanding and measuring project success, a key ingredient in project management: An analytical research paper

Abstract

Projects are shown in this article as potent strategic weapons that are started to produce economic value and competitive advantage. It implies that project managers are the new strategic leaders and are fully accountable for the business outcomes of their projects. Therefore, defining and evaluating project success is a strategic management concept that should aid in coordinating project activities with the organization's short- and long-term goals. Although this idea seems straightforward and logical, there hasn't been much consensus among past studies about what actually makes a project successful. In fact, project success is a subject that is often debated but rarely settled upon. The definition of project success has remained vague. Because of the wide range of interpretations, it is a concept that can mean very different things to very different individuals, which gives rise to debates about whether a project is successful or not. While many of these studies produce lists of critical success factors, each list's scope and objectives differ. Typically, the success criteria are categorized as either highly generic or very specialized factors that only apply to a certain project.

This paper seeks to identify and assess what contribute to project success and whether the implementation of project management practices improve projects success, in order to do so, a narrative literature review of the pertinent most recent works on a number of subjects is conducted.

Keywords: Project success, project management, critical success factors, project success criteria, project management practices

JEL Classification: M10

Paper type: Theoretical Research (analytical research)