Project Success

Scott W. Ambler, a DDJ Senior Contributing Editor, Practice Leader Agile Development with IBM Rational, and author of several best-selling books conducted a research to find out how people define projects success, and provided some statistics to his reader (Defining Success. Dr.Dobb's Portal. October 31, 2007):

• Schedule: 61.3 percent of respondents said that it is more important to deliver a system when it is ready to be shipped than to deliver it on time.
• Scope: 87.3 percent said that meeting the actual needs of stakeholders is more important than building the system to specification.
• Money: 79.6 percent said that providing the best return on investment (ROI) is more important than delivering a system under budget.
• Quality: 87.3 percent said that delivering high quality is more important than delivering on time and on budget.
• Staff: 75.8 percent said that having a healthy, both mentally and physically, workplace is more important than delivering on time and on budget.

In general, I like his approach and ideas. However, there is one thing that bothers me a bit. Despite of the fact, that Scott provides different rankings for different categories of respondents, at least 94.7% (there is no exact information about others) of respondents were IT people.

Having tough experience working with various customers, and being a customer myself, I wasn't able to identify which one of the following is usually more important: Quality, Scope, Time or Money. Each case is different, but almost all the time it's some kind of a compromise between those four variables.


Everyone would be happy to get even more than they wanted and, in additional, in supreme quality. But in real life we still have to worry about time and budget, which are usually (yet, not alway) general constraints. So I agree that quality and scope can be ranked on the 1st two places... but only after taking other constraings into account.