Project Management Best Practices, 5th Edition

16Value‐Driven Project Management

16.0 INTRODUCTION

Over the years, we have come to accept the traditional definition of project success, namely meeting the triple constraints of time, cost, and scope. More recently, we modified our definition of success by stating that there must be a valid business purpose for working on the project. Success was then recognized as having both a business component and a technical component, as well as meeting strategic business objectives.

Today, we are modifying the definition of success further by adding in a “value” component, as seen in Figure 16–1. In other words, the ultimate purpose of working on the project should be to provide some form of value to both the client and the parent organization. If the project's value cannot be identified, then perhaps we should not be working on it at all.

Value can be defined as what the stakeholders perceive the project's deliverables as being worth. Each stakeholder can have a different definition of value. Furthermore, the actual value may be expressed in qualitative rather than purely quantitative terms. It simply may not be possible to quantify the actual value.

The importance of the value component cannot be overstated. Consider the following statements:

• Completing a project on time and within budget does not guarantee success if you are working on the wrong project.
• Even having the greatest enterprise project management (EPM) methodology in the world cannot guarantee that value will be there ...