Defining ‘success’ for software projects: An exploratory revelation

Success is found relatively rare in the world of software projects. One possible reason may be the difference in the perception of the meaning of ‘success’ in the minds of people who evaluate the project performance. Usually, stakeholders external to the project organization use target cost and time for inferring ‘project success’ while those internal to project agree that the attainment of ‘scope’ of development decides the ‘project success’. Hence, project success criteria, as believed by different groups of stakeholders, do not match. In this study, we examine the views of one such internal set of stakeholders: Programmer/Developers, Project Managers and Customer Account Managers. We conducted an exploratory survey to determine their view of a successful project. We found surprising uniformity in different constituents of this particular group of stakeholders and all of them overwhelmingly considered meeting the ‘scope’ of software projects, which comprises the functionality and quality of the project outcome, as the highest determinant of success. We believe that this view of software project success in the eyes of software professionals should be studied further to build a comprehensive project evaluation framework and should be utilized effectively to achieve success in terms of external objectives like customer satisfaction and customer happiness.