Strategic Project Management Made Simple: Practical Tools for Leaders and Teams

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Question #2—How Do We Measure Success?

What’s easy to measure isn’t always important; what’s important isn’t always easy to measure.

—Albert Einstein

FIGURE 6.1 The LogFrame Helps Define What Success of Each Objective Means

Winning the Peace After Winning the War

My appreciation of the Logical Framework’s power to tackle the big hairy audacious goals multiplied after I served as a consultant to His Excellency the Wali of Dhofar in the Southern Region in the Sultanate of Oman. Oman is a small Arab country tucked beneath Saudi Arabia on the edge of the Arabian Sea. While this example may seem far from your field of work, it shows how this approach can organize people to plan and execute an ambitious and complex change strategy.

In the mid-1970s, Oman was wracked by Chinese-backed insurgents from Yemen who enticed some of the local population to rebel against the government. Following years of fighting, the war ended after the government finally found a compelling way to convince the rebels to lay down their arms and surrender: They paid them in cash.

Having won the war, His Excellency then shifted his attention to “winning the peace”—a much tougher proposition. At the time, Oman’s population consisted primarily of nomadic herdsmen without permanent homes. The herdsmen had to constantly move their cattle in search of scarce water, whose location varied with shifting rainfall ...