📌 How to read this page This is the core of the wiki: it focuses on the small set of factors that research shows drive most variation in outcomes (benefits realised), not just delivery performance.

📊 How to use this page For each factor:

1. Run the Quick Diagnostic
2. If 2+ signals apply → treat as a weakness
3. Take one action this week
4. Reassess regularly Progress comes from fixing the weakest factor—not doing everything. Reassess regularly

Use this as a diagnostic guide, not a mechanical recipe. Projects often begin with incomplete information, and the work is to keep goals, decisions, commitment, and learning aligned as reality emerges.

This page is open for contributions. The six factors below reflect the current weight of evidence. If you have research, case studies, or field experience that supports, challenges, or extends any of them, you are invited to add it. See Contribute a Case Study or Research Finding at the bottom of this page.

Factor 1 — Strategy: Clarity of Goals

Factor 2 — Leadership: The Active Sponsor

Factor 3 — Commitment to Success

Factor 4 — Culture: Raising Issues Early

Factor 5 — Governance and Decision Quality

Factor 6 — Project Manager Competence

Contribute a Case Study or Research Finding

Why only six factors?

The project management literature has identified over 47 factors thought to contribute to project success (Radujković et al., 2021). Professional standards and certification syllabuses reflect this complexity — producing guidance that is comprehensive but effectively unactionable.

This wiki takes a different position: not all factors are equal, and pretending otherwise has cost the profession decades of misdirected effort.

The six factors on this page were selected using three independent filters applied simultaneously:

Filter 1 — Empirical evidence of outcome impact. Factors had to show a consistent relationship with project success (benefits realised, strategic objectives achieved) — not just project management success (on time, on budget). These are different things, and the distinction matters enormously. Sources include Young & Poon (2013), Young et al. (2019), Flyvbjerg & Gardner (2023), and the McKinsey-Oxford study (2012).

Filter 2 — Replication across project types and sectors. Factors that only appear in IT projects, or only in megaprojects, were weighted lower. The factors on this page hold across construction, IT, organisational change, public sector, and private sector contexts.

Filter 3 — Convergence across independent research traditions. No single research group or methodology determines what appears here. The factors below are those where academic researchers, practitioner-led studies, and post-project review analyses arrive at the same conclusion independently.

What was excluded — and why — is covered in The Other 80%. The short version: planning, methodology compliance, and technical tools show up consistently as necessary but not sufficient. They explain delivery variance, not outcome variance.