Measuring Project Success: Emergence of Dimensions

Abstract

Though Project management emerged as a discipline by 1960 it has gained importance in industries like construction, engineering, health care, R&D etc. during the last two decades. With the increased importance of project management, the need for understanding what actually contributes to the success of projects have also increased. Over the period of time the concepts of project success have widened and many dimensions of success have emerged. Project Success is an important domain in project management. From the earlier period onwards time, cost and quality/scope have been defined as the basic criteria for measuring project success. Many studies have been conducted for addressing project success and till now there is no consensus on what actually determines project success. When the project faced time overrun, cost overrun or the outcome did not meet the requirement, the project was considered failure. But today, determining project success of failure is far more complex. Even after meeting these criteria, projects fall into failure category. This paper tries to review the available literature on project success and various arguments on success by researchers. From this paper it can be concluded that project success is a multidimensional construct with human dimension, business and market dimension along with efficiency dimension.