A Comparative Framework for Measuring Project Success

摘要

Project success is a vague concept among researchers and practitioners. Many researchers have tried to explain when a project could be called successful, but there is no agreement. The reason is existence of different stakeholders and viewpoints in a project. In this article we aim to make a comparative framework to compare different viewpoints and discover intersections and variances in the concept of project success to decrease these diversities. We review 173 selected papers and make an integrated framework containing nine different viewpoints that could be used as a raw dataset to explore trends in the literature and hidden aspects of project success. Analyzing statistics of this framework we found that: 1) Although the focus on stakeholders' satisfaction are increasing but still cost, time and quality is dominating success criteria for evaluating project success. And also we categorized nine success criteria to three levels of priority i.e. high, medium and low priority, based on the frequency of appearance in the papers. Then we found some corelationships between nine groups of criteria using Association Rules method. 2) During 80s most papers deal with cost,time and quality (project management success), and in 90s it expanded to customer satisfaction (product success), then currently, it expanded to multiple project evaluation (program success). We also found that there are still some forgotten parts of project success and we argue that one of the most important hidden aspects is ”Project Selection Success”. It should be considered because it defines project success at its origin. Furthermore its in?uence on the project management and total project success is not clearly defined in the literature.