Stanislav Belyaev

Empowering Teams, Advancing Engineering

Success Factors for Projects

The page contains refenrences I meontioned during the presentation (the link is below). And a brief summary of it. The Russian version of this page is here.

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Presentation (RUS)



Summary

According to the CHAOS report, which collects and analyzes statistics of projects, the relative number of failed projects steadily goes down, and successful projects are increasing. That is splendid! We as human beings analyze our experiences and put out insights from them.

Does Methodology induce a project’s success? The statistic answers - yes! Projects carried on with Waterfall (a classical approach) are highly likely will be failed, and will hinder successful progress. And I would like to highlight that the methodology, in this case Agile or any other flexible approach, is not a silver bullet. But, if the Project Manager is experienced in implementing Agile practices in a huge project, that will definitely be a win-win situation for the project.

The next of criterion that confuses the listeners ) Does the Manager’s experience affect a project’s delivery result? The answer is NO! There is no visible and firm connection between the manager’s experience and the successful delivery of the project. That absolutely doesn’t mean that even a Junior project manager can carry out project. Also, you can’t conclude that whether a PM is present or absent on the project, doesn’t make sense for a project’s outcomes. The PM is an essential part of the project. No one can’t just blindly eliminate this role.

To conclude, the CHAOS report drew up and ranked criteria that be used for the examination of a project, as a checklist. You can try to apply the table and weights to a project you are running now and get a possible estimation of the project’s success. Or, I would recommend highlighting the criteria that are required of you to focus on and work on them for improvements.

References