That’s just how we do things.
That is the attitude of the technicians at installation company 'Er Warmpjes Bij'. At the end of the day, you simply write your work orders down on paper; the administration will handle it. The company director, however, thinks differently; he sees his people doing double work. And double work means double money!
Therefore, he initiates a project to have a technical tool developed that digitizes the work orders and immediately processes them into the administration. All of this is linked to an online dashboard so that it is possible to see exactly which mechanic is doing what, the costs, the revenue, etc. Absolutely fantastic!
The director appoints Gerrit, a true IT specialist, as project manager. Gerrit hits the ground running. He delivers the new tool, plus dashboard, plus explanation to the technicians. Exactly on the agreed date, and Gerrit stays well within budget. Upon delivery, the director is happy: what a time saver this will be!
And then it becomes quiet
Six weeks later, the director walks past the administration. Someone is sitting there typing up a stack of paper work orders. When he asks how that is possible, the mechanics shrug their shoulders. Filling them out on your phone takes way too long when you are standing on scaffolding with cold fingers, and it is completely impossible with work gloves on.
Gerrit doesn't understand it at all. He delivered exactly what was in the plan, on time and within budget, and all 34 requirements from the specifications have been checked off. And that is precisely where the problem lies.
Everyone holds their own yardstick.
IPMA is clear on this. A project realized within the agreed management frameworks does not necessarily lead to the satisfaction of the involved stakeholders. Only when all parties involved are satisfied with the final result is it considered a successful project.
For this, you need success and failure criteria : the key aspects on which the various stakeholders assess the progress and outcome of a project. Pay particular attention to that word 'various'.
Gerrit had three of them. On time, within budget, according to specifications. Excellent criteria, fitting the project manager's perspective. However, the mechanic had a completely different criterion: that he could go home earlier at the end of the day. And the director was quietly counting on fewer hours of administration. Those two criteria were not written down anywhere, even though they definitely existed..
What was missing from the specifications
A specification of requirements describes the totality of functional, technical, and operational requirements that the result must meet . Functional requirements concern the operation of the end result, while technical requirements concern the properties of the product itself.
Operational requirements are a different matter, as they are set by the end users. They indicate how the result must be operable, under what conditions, and in what environment it must be able to function.
Gerrit never picked them up . The mechanics, who are really the end users in this story, were not asked anything.
Fit for purpose is not yet fit for use
The project result is the final product you deliver, the deliverable. The benefits only arise when people start applying that result in practice . For this to happen, users must experience added value or convenience from it. This is called fit for use; that desired added value should simply be described in the requirements specification.
On paper, Gerrit's tool was perfectly fine. On the scaffolding, no one found it easy to use, so it was not used and the benefits the director was counting on never materialized. And that is precisely where the difference lies compared to how Gerrit viewed it. A result that does not meet the requirements cannot be used effectively, jeopardizing the intended benefits.
You assess criteria, you influence factors
Two things are easily confused here. Success criteria are the aspects on which your project is assessed. Success factors are the things that increase the likelihood of meeting those criteria, and failure factors are the opposite of that.
Periodic research by the Standish Group, among others, reveals a number of recurring factors. At the top of the list is user involvement; IPMA Compact is explicit about what happens if you skip this: you get incomplete acceptance criteria, no interim assessment of delivered results, and acceptance problems upon delivery . All three apply to installation company Er Warmpjes Bij.
Two other factors that are within your control:
- Support from senior line management. If that is lacking, the necessary people and resources are simply not made available.
- Simple version. By not pursuing too many goals at once and tailoring the method to the complexity of your project, you maintain an overview.
Good project management appears on that same list, with the caveat that the method used must be a tool and not an end in itself. IPMA specialist Mimoun el Ouarti sees in practice how often organizations underestimate this and have projects executed by people who do it as a side job. 'So, do you have a serious project? Put a serious professional on it; why else are you doing those projects?'
Two types of success
A second distinction helps with the evaluation. Project success is about the extent to which the project result satisfies the stakeholders. Project management success is about the extent to which those stakeholders are satisfied with the way you managed the project.
The second point is more concrete than it sounds. One of the criteria mentioned by IPMA states that users must have been involved from the outset in establishing the program of requirements and have been able to assess and accept interim results. Gerrit is therefore making concessions on two fronts, as there is also something to criticize about that way of working.
The question you ask before you start
Establish your success criteria in consultation with your stakeholders before anything is built. Go through them one by one with the same question: what will you be looking at in a year to determine if this has succeeded? At 'Er Warmpjes Bij', that question to just one technician yielded enough results to restructure the entire project.
Next, establish performance indicators , including the desired outcome, and assign people responsible for managing those values. Measure and evaluate regularly, because what you measure gets attention. And along the way, ask yourself if you are involving the users enough.
Finally, conclude with an evaluation together with your team, your client, and the steering committee . Learning in projects is a social activity, because discussing experiences with one another gives them meaning for everyone. Document the lessons learned in a learning report and share them with fellow project managers so that knowledge of success and failure factors within the organization increases.
That way, at least the next Gerrit knows he has to go up the jetty first. 😉
Do you want to develop yourself as a project manager? Then take one of our IPMA training courses.
Where can you find this?
This article is based on IPMA Compact (Lagant, version 3.0, 2025), chapter Technical Competencies. Success and failure criteria, success and failure factors, project success and project management success, and learning from lessons learned are found in Competency V1 Project Approach, section V1.1 Project Design. The concepts of requirement, program of requirements, acceptance criteria, and fit for use are taken from Competency V2 Requirements and Goals, section V2.1 Expectations and Requirements. This material falls under the attainment targets for IPMA B, C, and D. The mentioned success and failure factors are derived from periodic research by, among others, the Standish Group, which refers to the factor “good project management” in the book as competent project management.
