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project success: success factor and success criteria Essay

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AN ESSAY ON
PROJECT SUCCESS DEFINED BY SUCCESS FACTORS AND SUCCESS
CRITERIA
by M. Shaw
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm

Winston Churchill
INTRODUCTION
1.

Since the 1960s there have been an increasing number of Project Management

scholars that have expressed concerns regarding the ways to manage the success or failure of a project. Crawford (2000) theorised that there are two major avenues of thought in this area being: how success is judged and the factors that contribute to the success. These two avenues were later crowned ‘success factors’ and ‘success criteria’ respectively of which both will be discussed in depth during this essay to provide an insight for …show more content…

Table 1: The Square Root (Atkinson, 1999)

Figure 2: The Square Root (Atkinson, 1999)

5.

The Information System. Whilst Atkinson (1999) doesn’t detail the

information system success criteria other than what is described in the table it is reasonable to suggest he was concerned with the ‘ilities’ of the project. Essentially
Atkinson was considering the maintenance of the project to ensure that it was not only resourced but also governed that the information would support its continued success.

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6.

Organisational Benefits. Success of a project must not only be considered

from an individual perspective, rather it must look at how it will also benefit the organisation. Table 1 presents these areas however there are two areas that must be considered individually, namely efficiency and effectiveness. Success of a project is not necessarily guaranteed due to efficiency, reducing the amount of workload due to shortening of processing won’t necessarily help without the consideration of effectiveness. Effectiveness considers whether or not the goals are being achieved thus when placed with efficiency it ensures that the goals are being achieve quickly and in full.
7.

Stakeholder Community Benefits. The final area of the Square Root that

Atkinson considers is the success criterion that benefits the stakeholder community.
These criterion consider the wider benefits of not just the direct outcomes of the
project

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