The Project Management Institute shifted its definition of project success in the PMBOK® Guide, 7th Edition (2021) — moving from delivery against time, cost, and scope toward outcomes, benefits, and value. This was a significant institutional acknowledgement that the profession had been measuring the wrong things.
But it is not a new insight.
Researchers had been making this distinction for decades. David Baccarini formalised it in 1999 in his paper The Logical Framework Method for Defining Project Success, published in the Project Management Journal. He separated two things that are routinely conflated:
A project can score well on the first and fail entirely on the second. That distinction has been consistently reinforced in the research literature ever since, and has now been formally absorbed into mainstream professional standards — more than twenty years later.
The table below summarises the view of success that has emerged as the research has matured. Success is not a single test at project closure. It includes short-term delivery performance, medium-term business or organisational outcomes, and longer-term stakeholder or societal value. This is the frame used throughout the wiki: delivery still matters, but it is only one layer of success (Note: project plan success can be seen to have been over-emphasised in the past because it has the most success criteria).
Reproduced with permission from Young, R. (2024) Case Studies of Best Practice in Project Management: Insights from Project Management Award Winners.
While the definition of success has evolved, the mainstream advice has not.
Most professional guidance still emphasises planning, scheduling, process compliance, and reporting and control. These are necessary. But they are not what determines outcomes.
The evidence — accumulated across decades of project research — is consistent: projects succeed or fail primarily because of governance, executive support, and decision quality. Not technique.
This finding is NOT based on a single dataset. IT project failure has been documented since the 1950s (Caminer, 1958; Garrity, 1963). Independent research spanning almost 70 years — including a McKinsey-Oxford study of 5,400 large IT projects, Flyvbjerg's peer-reviewed database of 16,000+ projects across 136 countries, and empirical governance research across international datasets — all point in the same direction. The pattern holds across project types, sectors, and geographies, with no credible evidence of improvement over time.
Empirical case study research into award-winning projects confirms the mechanism: it is top management — not the project manager — who most determines whether a project delivers its intended outcomes. Strategy, leadership, commitment, and culture are the dominant variables. Methodology and tools are not.
Yet these factors remain underemphasised in professional training, loosely defined in standards, and poorly taught in practice.