It is important to see the business from as many different perspectives as possible to know what success looks like. These perspectives will allow you to identify key Stakeholders and each may have different success criteria.
While changes can be evolutionary or revolutionary in nature, they have traditionally focused on the following:-
Economics - Reduce costs, increase selling price. = More profitReducing Environmental impact is increasingly seen as an important factor in corporate strategy.
Different Stakeholders will have varying views on what these improvements should be.
For example, a bus company's view of Efficiency will include
carrying
more passengers = bigger buses (or smaller seats!),
But a customer sees
Efficiency as less time travelling = quicker, more punctual
services.
Local authorities and government want to see less traffic and
polution
= improved fuel efficiency and fewer private car journeys.
There are also operational success factors that cover all categories. In this example travel safety would be applicable to each.
Before a project begins it is vital to have a clear understanding of what is to be achieved and how these achievements will be measured. The project can then be assessed as it progresses to verify that it is indeed heading in the right direction and that its targets are being reached.
These aspirations are known as Critical Success Factors and are the motivation for investment.
For a project to provide these Critical Success Factors they need to be distiled into real Performance Measures, known as Key Performance Indicators, which are quantifiable benchmarks e.g., 98% of journeys arrive on time.
Similarly, a new computer system's CSF may be to improve data throughput by 50%. - The corresponding KPI might be that the system can handle 5000 transactions per minute. The project team now have a specific goal with an exact measurement.
Not all Critical Success Factors are so easily interpreted. e.g., the requirement to 'improve customer satisfaction' does not readily translate into an obvious Performance Indicator.
In these circumstances seek agreement on what constitutes 'customer satisfaction' and devise a means by which this might be improved. Here are some example measures:
Collecting this data before a system is operational presents its own challenges.
A favoured method is to pilot with a small subset of the eventual users.
If this is not possible then another approach is to proactively investigate what makes customers happy, or unhappy, and make improving these your KPIs.
e.g., excesive time taken to complete a transaction or the number of forms to fill or errors returned, are all factors that will have a detrimental effect on customer satisfaction and can also be transformed into measurable targets.
Without agreement on what success looks like you may find it difficult to prove that a project has achieved its objectives.
Stakeholders can have different views on what constitutes success.
Providing measurable objectives gives a project team clear understanding of what they are expected to produce.
The more difficult success is to define, the more important it is to agree a set of measures to work towards.