A Circles Model to Measure and Predict Project Success

Abstract

Measuring project success is a challenging issue among researchers and practitioners, because of its multi-dimensional properties. During the last three decades, numerous researchers have tried to define and illustrate its dimensions. But still there is no general agreement about it. To measure and predict success of a project, we need to take into account all project stages including utilization stage of the product of a project in an integrated approach. In this paper we try to introduce a novel model to measure project success considering selection, execution and utilization stages. The model is based on the deviations from the goal of each stages. And the amount of success in this model which we call the "Circles Model", is the magnitude of proximity to the final goal. We apply it to an example and measure its success quantitatively. Lastly we discuss four extensible directions for future studies to apply the model on high performance projects, multi stakeholders space, program and portfolio domain and finally to explore the influence of the performance of each stage on the performance of the next stages.