Evaluating the Success of a Project and the Performance of Its Leaders

Abstract

Although organizations regularly execute projects to improve their performance, there is still no agreement in the literature on how to evaluate their eventual success. As a result, scholars end up using different scales to measure the same outcome variable of project success, thereby causing inconsistency in research results. Existing project success evaluation models suffer from their inability to apply to all project types and lack of separation of project success measurement from that of project individuals' performance (for e.g., of the project manager). Through two longitudinal studies based on the satisficing theory, this paper develops, validates, and illustrates generic scales to measure the success of any project, as well as the performance of its two key leaders. This results in three distinct project success dimensions: 1) Project management success-evaluates the performance of the project manager in achieving the project plan; 2) Project ownership success-evaluates the performance of the project owner in realizing the business case; and 3) Project investment success-evaluates the investment performance of the project for its funder. This paper contributes to the literature by offering a theoretically robust, multidimensional evaluation model that will enhance performance evaluation of both projects and their leaders.