Net Project Success Score: A Game-Changer or Just Another Metric?

The PMI released their new report into project success and advocate for using a Net Project Success Score. What is it and how do you use it?

The score is derived from a survey asked of stakeholders during project execution.

What is Net Project Success Score?

The PMI propose asking the question retrospectively (i.e. when a project is complete). I think there is value changing the question so we can ask it during delivery.

The question to ask is “to what extent do you think this project is going to deliver value that will be worth the effort and expense?”

Respondents are asked to rate their answer on a scale of 0(low) to 10(high).

Scores of 9 or 10 are promoters and add 1 to your score. Scores of 0 to 6 are detractors and deduct 1 from your score. So your Net Project Success Score is the percentage of people scoring 9 or higher, minus the percentage of people scoring 6 or lower.

Who do we ask?

Who you ask the question to will alter the score.

The people who you ask need to meet certain criteria to be considered useful contributors to the score.

• You should ask people who have enough knowledge about the project to have an informed opinion.

• You should ask people who will be involved in the project for the duration so you can re-take the score at intervals with the same people (reduces noise in the data set).

• You should ask people who have the authority and capability to alter components of the project. If the score is low, you want people who can make decisions to improve the score.

• And you should think twice before including the sponsor in the dataset. The sponsor can introduce confirmation bias into the score

If you have a low number of people, the score will have the propensity to change wildly frequently. If you’re only asking 5 people, for example, 1 person changing from a detractor to a promoter could improve the score by 40%. You need a decent number of people to reduce the chance of this happening.

When do we ask?

How often you should ask this question, how often you should calculate this score, depends on what you’re going to do with the score.

If you’re not going to do anything with the score, then simply don’t ask the question. It will be a waste of time.

If the score is going to be used to create a conversation about “why is it lower than it was 3 months ago” then take the score when there is time for the conversation.

The length of your project will be a factor you should consider. If your project is only 6 months long, taking the score every 6 months won’t give you data points for course-correction, should one be needed. But if your project is 3 years long, taking the score every week will start to create score-fatigue and question the efficacy of the results.

I am a big advocate for taking the score more frequently during earlier phases of a project. If we’re still in planning and not yet executing, taking the score frequently can help create a view of whether stakeholders are supportive of the plan. It’s always cheaper to change approach when planning than when executing.

What do we do with the score?

Here’s what not to do with the score

• Do not compare it to other projects.

• Do not compare it to a benchmark (scores higher than 50 are good and lower are bad)

Every project has a different context and a different set of conditions that mean the scores are not directly comparable. A score of 20 for one project might be hard-won and the best it is going to be, whereas a score of 60 for another project might be considered low and “should do better”.

Use the score to have a conversation.

• What do participants think we can do to increase the score? How do we get more value from the project; or how do we maintain the value for lower effort and cost?

• How is the score trending over time? Are the collective gaining in confidence or losing confidence? Why is that and what should we do about it?

If the metric is used to have these difficult conversations, it is probably accretive to project success.