Determining Project Success: Launching and Landing a Project
Delivering the final result of your project to the client or user is what’s called a project launch. But does it work well? Did it achieve your desired outcome? The real deciding factor of project success is when you put the final outcome to the test.
Landing is when you actually measure the success of your project using the success criteria established at the outset of the project.
Your success has to continue beyond the point of delivering the final project. You need to be able to measure whether the project functions as intended once it’s put into practice.
Launches are only a means to an end, and looking beyond the launch is important to ensure the launch achieves your overall goals.
The success criteria include all the specific details of your goals and deliverables, and it can be a guide so you know whether you’ve accomplished what you set out to do. Success criteria will set standards for how your project will be judged.
When working on a project, the goal isn’t simply to launch it, but to land it. Landings occur once your project achieves a measure of success. As project managers, landings are what we strive for and what we celebrate. They are the ultimate reward for all of our efforts.
A project “launching” means you have delivered the final results of the project to the client or user. You can’t solely base project success on when the client accepts the project, though. Your work on a project won’t be complete until you “land” it by thoroughly measuring the results. This is when the success criteria and the metrics you defined initially when setting SMART goals will come in handy.
A common mistake of many project teams is to “launch and forget” the results. This happens when a project manager delivers the project to the client and the client accepts the project delivery, but the project manager doesn’t assess if the project deliverables satisfy the customer or user.
A project landing shouldn’t create more hurdles. If done correctly, a landing creates greater alignment within the teams on the end results you all desire, and it gives everybody on the team better visibility on how to achieve success.
Look over your notes, talk with your team, meet with the client, and remember to return to your intended deliverables and metrics to help you measure success.
At the beginning of the project, you defined goals and deliverables that are measurable — meaning that you can determine if they were met. Similarly, you need to define success criteria that can also be measured so you’ll know whether they were met.
The success criteria will tell you whether or not the project as a whole was successful. They are the specific details of your goals and deliverables that tell you whether you’ve accomplished what you set out to do. They are the standards by which the project will be judged once it’s been delivered to stakeholders and customers.
- Defining success criteria also clarifies for your team what they’re trying to accomplish beyond just launching something to users. Is it to increase customer satisfaction with the service so they can continue to purchase more products? Enhance an existing feature to retain customers? Depending on the project, the answers will be different.
But, it’s important that a team is aligned and working towards a shared goal. Sometimes forcing the conversation and clarifying what the end result looks like can bring to light questions and areas of disagreement.
Determining Project Success
- Go through your project goals and deliverables, review the scope, and identify the measurable aspects of your project.
- These are going to be any of the metrics used in the goals and deliverables, along with your budget and schedule details.
2. Get clarity from stakeholders on the project requirements and expectations. There are lots of people involved with any project, and that means lots of ideas about what success looks like to each person. You’ll want to ask questions, such as:
- Who ultimately says whether or not the project is successful?
- What criteria will be measured to determine success?
- What’s the success of this project based on?
3. Once you’ve collected clarifying information, document and share all of it so that you, your team, and your stakeholders can refer to it later.
It’s not enough just to make a list of criteria; you need a process for measuring success from start to finish throughout the entire project life cycle. This way, you can make adjustments and ensure success by the time you’re ready to land.
The metrics you choose should be as closely aligned to your project’s goal as possible. For example, “happiness metrics” measure user attitudes and satisfaction, or perceived ease of use, and you can measure these through surveys. Consider customer adoption and engagement metrics, along with more business-oriented metrics that track things like sales and growth.
- Adoption refers to how the customer uses and adopts a product or service without any issues. Adoption metrics might include launching a new product to a group of users and having a high amount of them use or adopt it.
- Engagement refers to how often or meaningful customer interaction and participation is over time. Engagement metrics might include increasing the daily usage of a design feature or increasing orders and customer interactions.
Once you’ve defined the metrics that you’ll be measuring, think about how you track these metrics. Evaluate which tools can help you collect the data you need to ensure you’re staying on track. For example, if you’re measuring business metrics like revenue, consider tracking that in a spreadsheet or dashboard, where you can easily spot gaps and trends. If you’re measuring customer satisfaction, you can think of a way to incentivize customers to participate in regular email surveys and create a system to measure their responses when they participate.
You can also utilize your project management tools to check on efficiency metrics, like what per cent of tasks are completed or whether the project is progressing alongside the planned timelines.
It’s smart to measure success with your team as a project or product is in progress. For example, you can hold a project review once a month, have team members complete task checklists by certain deadlines, or hold live feedback sessions with your users or customers.
It’s a good idea that, along with each success criteria on your list, to also include the methods for how success will be measured, how often it’s measured, and who’s responsible for measuring it.
Share your success criteria document with your stakeholders and ask if they agree with how the project’s success will be determined. It’s also a good idea to have the appropriate stakeholders sign off on the success criteria.
- This way, everyone will be clear on who is responsible for which tasks, and you’ll all thoroughly understand what the path to success entails.
- Keep this documentation visible throughout the duration of the project and clearly communicate it with your team every step of the way.
The success criteria should be clearly agreed upon at the beginning of the project. The stakeholders and customers ultimately judge if the team meets the success criteria.
Defining your success criteria should create greater alignment within the team and give everybody better visibility into how to achieve success. Clarity around success metrics also helps teams prioritize which efforts are most impactful to their users.
Adoption refers to how the customer uses the product without any issues.
Engagement refers to how often customer interaction happens over time.
We can also determine the success of a project by the quality of the product, the ability to fulfil the needs of your customers, and the need to meet the expectations of your stakeholders.
Product quality
The product, or final result, of a project, has its own set of attributes that define success. The product attributes that are necessary for the product’s success include completeness in features, quality of features, unit cost, usability, etc. The extent that a product is complete will contribute to the product’s success. This can apply to any project in which you deliver a product or tangible outcome at the end. To keep us on track for success, we can create a list of product requirements to ensure that you do not miss anything.
To measure the success of a product, consider including these metrics on your checklist:
- Track if you implemented the product’s priority requirements
- Track and assess the product’s number of technical issues or defects
- Measure the percentage of features you delivered or released at the end of the project
What is important to the customers or stakeholders
We have to pay attention to product metrics, but we also have to be mindful of stakeholders' and customers' additional expectations for features and objectives.
Think about what needs the project satisfies for your stakeholders or customers. These strategic goals tie back to the business case and the reason you initiated the project in the first place. Often, you can measure the fulfilment of strategic goals via user or customer metrics. Metrics to consider include:
- Evaluating user engagement with the product
- Measuring stakeholder and customer satisfaction via surveys
- Tracking user adoption of the product by using sales data
Document, align and communicate success
Understanding where we are and where we are going helps the project team determine if they are on track.
You need to get clarity from stakeholders on the project requirements and expectations. There are many people involved in any project, and success will look different for each of them. You want to ask questions, such as: Who ultimately says whether or not the project is successful? What criteria will be measured to determine success? What is the success of this project based on?
It is best practice to get the key stakeholders or the steering committee to review and approve your success criteria. This becomes a mutual agreement on how all parties define the success of the project.
Remember, all projects encounter change. All parties must have continuous access and alignment to the success criteria agreed upon to avoid scope creep (uncontrolled change of the project’s scope) or failed expectations at the end of the project. It’s important to document success criteria upfront and continue to report on them throughout the project.
Success criteria, are the measurable attributes project managers use to determine whether or not a project was successful as a whole.
