A study of 179 project managers and project management office managers found that although most organizations understood the importance of effective project management, they simply do not do a good job of managing their project management (PM) process. This translates to project outcomes less stellar than expected.
There are many different stakeholder groups involved in a typical project (e.g., business process users, owners, users, business managers, clients, etc.) so it is understandable that each of these stakeholder groups has different goals and objectives for assessing project outcomes. At the most basic level, the triple constraint methodology (time, cost, quality) is most often used to assess project success. However, many now believe that triple constraint does not account for the varied dimensions of projects that need to be considered in their assessments. Current research in this area finds that there is a real lack of agreement on not only what constitutes project success, but on methods for more comprehensive assessment of project outcomes.
Given the varied dimensionality of a typical project, some have argued that there needs to be a distinction between PM success, in terms of the traditional triple constraints of time, cost, and quality, and project success, which is aligned with the product outcome of the project, and discerned through the stakeholders. Thus, it is quite possible to experience product success, but not PM success.
It is by now obvious that the traditional project measures of time, cost, and quality need to be enhanced by adding some additional project measurement dimensions, such as stakeholder benefits (e.g., customer satisfaction), product benefits ...