In Spite of “A Success” having so many parents (single sexed so it seems), not much attention has been given to the definition of success.
The PMI standard definition is the famous triangle of: On budget, On time and at the required quality, but this is simplistic, and as a simple example, would you consider a product that matched all those KPIs and still failed to give benefits to the customer, a success? Or a venture that missed all deadlines and costs and still managed to develop an economic way to send cargo to space (SpaceX) a failure?
It seems that we have to consider several hidden dimensions (alas smaller than the 11 hidden ones in modern physics), that control our definition of success.
The first dimension is efficiency – Did you indeed stood-up to time, budget and quality constraints? This is most notable in Production type activities, where you’ve done those things before and have low uncertainties regarding technologies, customers and internal processes. Think about adding a new chewing gum flavor as a new product for Wrigley, or a new feature on a SAP CRM platform. All the machinery or software pipelines are there and all you have to do is fill a template as best as you can.
However, there are activities that have less certainties in terms of customer definition and needs. Those are the places where you ask yourself who is the customer and what impact are you striving to achieve? Products and projects that target a new market, or provide a new tool for existing customers are of Exploratory type of activities. For example a company that is planning to provide a healthcare B2C product will try to Digital Persona Analysis to validate the needs and value it provides the the user, engage in a POC and maybe run for some time with an Alpha non-paying customer. This is much more relevant than just plugging some KPI in the Value/quality triangle.
Those product / project activities are sometimes done within an organization with a portfolio of activities, so the next question one has to ask herself is if this is the case, what is the impact of the product on the company’s activities. A good example is a company that is adding new applications to increase salespeople productivity. In this case, the value can only be measured on the organization as a whole, this type of activity is Integral one and creates wide side-effects on other activities.
The last success dimension is if the activity is aiming to prepare for the future. This is the classical R&D activity that targets new technology, future markets or maybe including a different line of services to the existing ones. This type of activity can for sure be part of a new venture or a Startup, but can also be part of large organizations that are strategically looking for the future. In those cases the measurement is actually how fast you adapt to feedback from the present and change direction to coming needs. A good example is a retail company that would like to monetize some of its internal software tools as services to other retailers, at first the target seems like providing one type of analytics but once there is feedback from potential customer that the need is different, the activity changes course at the expense of time and money just match the future needs of the products. Judging such a turn according to customary according to simplistic cost and time KPI would be harsh, since sticking to timeline and original costs will offshoot the market needs.
