What is success? One dictionary describes it as the accomplishment of an aim or a purpose.
If you don’t define success, how will you know if you are successful?
As with most projects, success breeds success. Success could mean more money in your pocket. Success could mean a promotion. Success could make you the best choice to manage the next project. Success will provide you with an advantage when asking for funding for the next project.
The lack of success can lead to some unintended consequences. It could mean a demotion or transfer. It could have a negative impact on your career path. It could have a negative impact on any and all future projects. What is worse is that this negativity could stay with you and/or your company for years.
Define Success…
Since it is extremely important for your project to be successful, you should take some time to come up with an objective way to determine success.
Hard numbers are best – create some metrics.
You could time the process. If it used to take 10 days to complete the process and now it takes 6 days, you have something to cheer about.
You could keep track of errors. If you normally encounter one error in each process and now you see only one error for every 3 processes, you have something to cheer about.
The take away from this is to come up with an objective way to measure success. Don’t leave this to a subjective interpretation, you don’t want this project to appear to be a failure because someone didn’t like the way you dress.
Project success greases the skid for other projects to follow. Project success could mean a profit instead of a loss. Measure for success…
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