The Relationship between Project Success and Project Efficiency

Many papers have rightly stated that meeting time, scope and budget goals, often called project efficiency, is not the ideal measure of project success. Broader measures of success have often been recommended. However, no paper has described the empirical value of the relationship between efficiency and overall success or shown whether efficiency is important at all to overall project success.Our aim in this paper is to correct that omission. Through a survey of 1,386 projects we have shown that project efficiency correlates to only 0.6 of overall project success and that that overall success in impacted by efficiency with a R2 of .36.