Key Success Factors And Importance Of Project Management

2144 Words5 Pages

There are definitions of projects in the literature and one of the best has been offered by Tuman (1983) which is a project is an organization of people dedicated to a specific purpose or objective. Projects generally involve large, expensive, unique, or high risk undertakings which have to be completed by a certain date, for a certain amount of money, with some expected level of performance. At a minimum, all projects need to have well defined objectives and sufficient resources to carry out all the required tasks.
According to PMI (1994), project management involves applying knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities in order to meet or exceed stakeholder needs and expectations. It is the art of directing and coordinating …show more content…

Then Baker, Murphy, and Fisher (1974) suggested replacing the time/cost/quality triangle by a measure of “perceived success.” These studies usually consisted of practitioners summarizing their experience and were not the result of scientific empiricism (Hazebroucq, 1993). It was Slevin and Pinto (1986) who proposed a scientific basis for success that comprises ten key success factors: project mission, top management support, project schedules/plan, client consultation, personnel, technical tasks, client acceptance, monitoring and feedback, troubleshooting, and communication. These ten factors are more or less “manageable” by the project team. Pinto and Slevin (1988b) then extended this list with four additional factors considered outside the project implementation process and therefore outside the team’s control: characteristics of the project team leader, power and politics, environmental events, and urgency. Many CSF lists and frameworks have been proposed by different authors, and some studies were done on the specific relation between a particular CSF and project success (see Jugdev & Müller, 2005). For example, Henderson (2004) studied the association between the project manager’s communication competency and project

Open Document