PMI’s New Definition of Success: Progress or Potholes?

When the PMI released their new definition of project success a few months ago — a project is one that delivers value worth the effort — I recoiled in disgust. It felt lazy, unscientific and had elements of execs marking their own homework. I didn’t like it at all. I still don’t. So I eagerly awaited the release of the full report to further drill down into the research and the conclusions of it.

TLDR; It’s not as bad as I thought. There are some good things in here. There are still some things that make me shudder and need more work. I’m undecided on Net Project Success Score.

What’s good?

There is a definite change of intent that the project management profession needs to move from successful execution, to successful delivery. Hallelujah! I couldn’t agree more. I’m glad that intent is finally being expressed by the PMI.

The report notes that this will require changing the role of the Project Manager. If the Project Manager needs to be accountable for outcomes, they need to be considered more of a business partner and less of an administrator. They need to be involved in a layer of decisions and conversations that they are often absent from today.

This raises a question of whether most Project Managers are capable of that change. There are many that are not. So many still don’t have a good definition of outcomes or how to deliver them. Attend this webinar to start your journey to outcome-focus on projects.

There’s acknowledgement in the report that the perception of value changes over time and is a continuum rather than binary. A project is not successful or a failure. Every project has elements of both.

What’s bad?

I still struggle with the fact that we’re measuring success based on stakeholder views of the project. If a stakeholder does not have an outcome focus (many don’t), then how do we evaluate success based on that stakeholder’s perceptions of whether the outcomes were achieved? There is a broad opportunity here for inaccuracy in defining whether a project was successful or not.

I don’t like the performance themes for success in the report. The report effectively says that projects that have a social or sustainability theme are more likely to be successful. Projects should think about how they contribute to social benefit if they want to be more successful. Whilst I have nothing against social benefit, this feels absolutely like a case of post hoc ergo proptor hoc. Just because, in their research, social benefit projects were rated more successful, does not mean if we include social benefit in our projects they are more likely to be successful. I was surprised and disappointed at this conclusion.

Net Project Success Score

Finally, we come on to Net Project Success Score (NPSS). Like other net promoter scores, it asks a ranking question to participants. Those ranking low are subtractors (reduce the score by 1), those ranking high are promoters (increase the score by 1). The total score is the sum of promoters less the sum of detractors. Globally, the NPSS is 36.

I’m undecided about this score.

On the plus side, a metric is good and allows analysis and decisions. If an organisation has two projects and one has an NPSS of 50 and the other has an NPSS of -50, it creates a conversation that should be healthy. This is the good thing about the score.

On the downside, the score is subjective based purely on the opinion of people asked. The score is not directly comparable. Like story points are not comparable across agile teams, NPSS is not really comparable across industries, organisations, or even projects. But, of course, that’s what people will do and what the PMI are already doing. For example, they proclaim that government projects have one of the lowest NPSS scores (17) and have work to do to be more successful. I don’t think we should use NPSS this way. The report rightly identifies that success is context dependent and then puts all of that to one side to try and logically compare projects with very different contexts.

Overall

I am thankful to the PMI for promoting the conversation about project success. It’s a really important conversation. I am pleased that outcome focus is more central to the conversation, but worry that many Project Managers don’t have the skills needed to deliver on the extended role of a Project Manager proposed in the report. I am intrigued by the concept of the Net Project Success Score — scared by how I think it will be used, and interested to see if it can be used to create interesting conversations in the governance board about the projects we’re leading.

Sign up for my free webinar on how to get more outcomes thinking into your projects.