What is really important for project success? A refined, multivariate, comprehensive analysis

Studies on project success factors were typically based on subjective lists for respondents to check, or on a limited number of managerial variables and success criteria. This comprehensive study uses multidimensional criteria for assessing project success, and employs multivariate statistical analyses for identifying the common managerial factors affecting almost all types of projects. Altogether, we used 13 success measures and 360 project management variables for our assessment. The use of a very detailed data set and multivariate methods enables us to address several perspectives which have not been adequately analysed by previous research. The main results of this study are: (i) A well-designed initiation phase is the most important factor in project success; (ii) organisational setup and project structure are not good predictors of project success; (iii) formal design and planning documents are instrumental in meeting project time and budget constraints, as well as in ensuring customer satisfaction from the end-product; (iv) design changes during the execution of the project are usually detrimental to the customer’s satisfaction, and contribute little to the improvement of the end-products.