Defining ‘success’ for software projects: An exploratory revelation

Purpose In today’s complex and rapidly evolving project environments, leadership competencies are increasingly recognised as a critical factor in achieving project success. This paper explores the core leadership competencies project managers need and examines the enablers that support as well as the barriers that limit, their effective application. Design/methodology/approach Following PRISMA 2020, 43 peer-reviewed studies published between 2005 and 2025 were identified through systematic searches of leading academic databases. Studies were assessed for relevance, quality and alignment with project leadership and success criteria. Findings The findings show that emotional intelligence, communication skills, strategic thinking, adaptability and empowerment consistently contribute to project success across sectors. These competencies enhance collaboration, stakeholder engagement and decision-making in uncertain contexts. Enablers such as supportive organisational cultures, effective communication and empowering leadership behaviours strengthen their application, while barriers including an overemphasis on technical skills, rigid cultures and limited use of competency-based frameworks continue to undermine effectiveness. Research limitations/implications The results emphasise the importance of a holistic approach to project leadership that develops behavioural, emotional and strategic capabilities alongside technical expertise. They also underline the need for deeper investigation into how leadership competencies shape success across diverse project types and contexts. Practical implications Organisations are encouraged to institutionalize leadership development practices and adopt adaptive frameworks to enhance leadership impact in real-world project environments. Originality/value Insights from 43 practical studies are consolidated, offering a comprehensive understanding of both enablers and barriers of project leadership competencies. The study provides actionable directions for organisations and future research on how leadership competencies drive project success.

The organizations have spent an increased amount of financial resources in systems and technology without getting all the potential of their investments or collecting the promise business benefits. Organizational success is widely defined as winning in the marketplace, and firms tend to measure this with financial and economic indicators. There is also a general agreement that although schedule and budget performance alone are considered inadequate as measures of project success, they are still important components of the overall construct. An early identification of the critical success factors (CSF) and project success criteria (PSC) during the initial project assessment is a vital start for ensuring successful project completions. This paper combines project management (PM) and benefits management (BM) practices with balanced scorecard (BSC) approach to align the projects with the organizational strategy. The usage of this mix of different management tools led to more effectiveness in project success.

Are software projects evaluated using software teams’ success criteria? A systematic literature review

Project managers often find it a challenge to successfully manage construction projects. As a result, understanding, evaluating, and achieving project success are critical for sponsors to control projects. In practice, determining key success factors and criteria to assess the performance of construction projects and forecast the success of new projects is difficult. To address these concerns, our objective is to go beyond the efficiency-oriented project success criteria by considering both efficiency- and effectiveness-oriented measures to evaluate project success. This paper contributes to existing knowledge by identifying a holistic and multidimensional set of project success factors and criteria using a two-round Delphi technique. We developed a decision support system using the Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) to forecast the success of mid- and large-sized construction projects. We gathered data from 142 project managers in Australia and New Zealand to implement the developed ANFIS. We then validated the constructed ANFIS using the K-fold cross-validation procedure and a real case study of a large construction project in Western Australia. The forecasting accuracy measures R2=0.97461, MAPE = 2.57912%, MAE = 1.88425, RMSE = 2.3610, RRMSE = 0.03149, and PI = 0.01589 suggest that the developed ANFIS is a very good predictor of project success.

Project success criteria are dependent variables that measure the successful outcome of a project, while project success factors are the independent elements of a project that can increase the likelihood of success. In other words, success criteria are used to measure success whilst success factors facilitate the achievement of success. The purpose of this paper is to systematically record and identify project success criteria as well as critical success factors found in the literature and published in academic journals in order to form an effective and widely accessible framework to measure project success. Time - schedule, cost - budget, user satisfaction, quality-performance, business and commercial performance are the most frequently used success criteria, followed by technical specifications and requirements, stakeholders’ satisfaction, strategic goals/objectives and competitiveness, functionality, project team satisfaction and safety. Some researchers also refer to contractor satisfaction, future perspective and environmental impact, while handful are those that support that effectiveness and suppliers’ satisfaction can influence project success. The critical factors influencing the success of projects are identified and commonly related to the following areas: project (e.g. clear goal, realistic schedule, adequate funds, resources, size, complexity), project manager and leadership (e.g. leadership, management of changes, effective conflict resolution, communication), project team members (e.g. communication, technical background, qualified team), organization (e.g. top management support, responsibility and authority chart) and external environment (client, technological environment, political environment, social environment, physical environment).

Successive Public Housing Building Project (PHBP) attempts have been unsuccessful due to a number of reasons. Among these is the lack of clearly defined success criteria which guides and measures PHBP success from inception to closure. The adoption and application of project management practice and project success criteria is to deliver projects successfully, attain enhanced output, develop framework to help track key project results and to enable the appropriate allocation of resources. This paper aimed to establish critical success criteria for PHBPs in Ghana. A questionnaire survey was employed to elicit the views of experienced professionals on 13 project success criteria identified from literature. Mean score analysis and factor analysis were conducted on the data collected. The results showed that PHBP practitioners perceive ‘cost of individual houses’ and ‘extensive use of local materials’ as the most critical success criteria with ‘risk containment’ emerging as the least critical criteria. It also revealed the following as the major underlysing factors for critical project success criteria for public housing projects in Ghana;‘Time, Cost and Quality Management’, ‘Satisfaction, Health and Environmental Safety’, ‘User Affordability and Design Consideration’ and ‘Cost of Individual Units and Technology’. These two findings are essential for developing a framework which will enable project managers involved in PHBPs in Ghana to channel appropriate efforts and behaviours towards ensuring the attainment of success on their projects.

Cyber security requirements are influenced by the priorities and decisions of a range of stakeholders. Board members and CISOs determine strategic priorities. Managers have responsibility for resource allocation and project management. Legal professionals concern themselves with regulatory compliance. Little is understood about how the security decision-making approaches of these different stakeholders contrast, and if particular groups of stakeholders have a better appreciation of security requirements during decision-making. Are risk analysts better decision makers than CISOs? Do security experts exhibit more effective strategies than board members? This paper explores the effect that different experience and diversity of expertise has on the quality of a team's cyber security decision-making and whether teams with members from more varied backgrounds perform better than those with more focused, homogeneous skill sets. Using data from 208 sessions and 948 players of a tabletop game run in the wild by a major national organization over 16 months, we explore how choices are affected by player background (e.g.,~cyber security experts versus risk analysts, board-level decision makers versus technical experts) and different team make-ups (homogeneous teams of security experts versus various mixes). We find that no group of experts makes significantly better game decisions than anyone else, and that their biases lead them to not fully comprehend what they are defending or how the defenses work.

The paper is based on a survey analyzing the success of IT projects in Poland as function of the cooperation with different stakeholders. The project’s participants expressed their subjective opinions on the effectiveness of the collective cooperation with various stakeholder groups. The impact of cooperation with different stakeholder groups: project team, management of the project implementation unit, suppliers and end users of the final product on the success of the project is examined. To this end, intuitionistic fuzzy sets, a correlation coefficient of intuitionistic fuzzy sets and an original method of intuitionistic fuzzy regression are applied. The conclusions point to the most important stakeholder groups for the complete success and for the avoidance of a complete failure of IT projects. Some possibilities of the extension of the proposed method are indicated, so that the decision maker can adopt it to his or her preferences in searching for project success or failure factors.

Public and private-sector organizations make significant investments in information technology projects to enable significant business change, drive organizational efficiency and effectiveness and achieve competitive advantages. Unfortunately, many of these projects do not achieve some or all of the planned business objectives and many are outright failures. This challenge in implementing projects has led to considerable research about both what constitutes project success criteria (the dependent variable) and what are the project success factors which influence achieving a successful project outcome (the independent variables). This paper will review the current state of the literature for both project success criteria and project success factors. Based on this review of the literature, a conceptual model is proposed to predict the potential success of a project for evaluation in future research, based on an adaptation of Westerveldt's (2003) Project Excellence® model which seeks to link project success factors with project success criteria.

Opening the black box: Managers’ perceptions of IS project success mechanisms

Despite the existence of systematic literature reviews focused on examining the factors contributing to project success, there remains a scarcity of reviews addressing the relationship between the project managers’ competencies and project success. To fill this gap in the literature, this review aimed to evaluate peer-reviewed articles, published between 2010 and 2022, and analyze the impact of project managers’ competencies on project success. The Web of Science, Scopus, ScienceDirect, and ProQuest electronic databases were first consulted in September 2021, with an update in August and October 2022. A total of 232 titles were analyzed. Ten articles met the criteria and were fully reviewed. A content analysis and a citation network were carried out to analyze the included articles. The analysis revealed that the existing literature has primarily explored the influence of competencies from the personal and social dimensions, such as leadership, communication, and emotional intelligence, on project success. Conversely, competencies from other dimensions have received less attention in the literature. In addition, this review contributes to the literature by providing a holistic categorization of competencies associated with project success and examining and organizing project success criteria into three dimensions.

A major challenge in Information Systems and Information Technology is to improve the ability to conceptualize, design, develop and deliver information systems that meet customer requirements. Project management is often adopted to create solutions that work and meet customer needs. The principles of project management as defined by the Project Management Institute, can improve project success rates. Researchers in the project management need to help practitioners understanding the impact of different principles on the success of IS development. This study undertakes a survey of project management experts on the state of practice and research to examine the need for improving project management, and suggest areas that can be improved. Research may be the most effective means of defining opportunities for enhancing project success rates by tapping the wealth of literature and complementing it with the expertise of project management practitioners. INTRODUCTION Software development applications require frequent changes and updates in order to support enterprise systems. These frequent changes to IS/IT comprise a large volume of software development efforts. These efforts, undertaken as projects, are generally complex and take place in a dynamic environment where business conditions and technologies change frequently during the life of the project (Chen, et. al., 2004). The factors of project success include user involvement and project size, management and planning (Schmidt, et al., 2001). A fully operational project management system in enterprise offers the best opportunity for project success through the implementation of methods and tools for planning, organizing, and managing team-based activities to accomplish specific directives (Jurison, 1999). Project management is widely adopted in Corporate America embraces project management to implement system changes (Muriithi & Crawford, 2003; Park & Pena-Mora, 2003; Yilmaz & Phillips, 2007), which are even considered as too significant to outsource (Fish & Seydel, 2006) or having high risk of leading to undesirable consequences (Wei & Peach, 2006). However, many projects fail, even when performed using project management techniques. Such project failure reduces the capability of technology components. The 2004 Chaos report by the Standish Group found that only 28% of IT projects were successful, down from 34% in earlier report; The proportion of IT projects canceled before completion increased to 18% (from 15%), and a further 51% of IT projects were considered challenged as they are seriously late, over budget and missing expected features (The Standish Group, 2004; The Standish Group, 2007). Possible causes for these findings are the size and expense of large projects, a return to traditional development practices on large projects (Boddy, 1993), the absence of user involvement (Turner & Cochrane, 1993; Akbulut & Motwani, 2005), and lack of executive support (Munns & Bjeirmi, 1996). Thus, scope management is regarded as a key area of successful project management in practice (Hayes, 2004). Although some project failures are because of technical reasons, most are directly related to the failure of stakeholders to embrace the principles of good project management (Jurison, 1999). As part of the project management process, project teams must understand the standards to which their projects are being held in order to ensure that project performance is emphasized appropriately (Crawford, 2005). The Field Guide to Project Management (Cleland, 2004) suggests that project management should be an easy sell to organizations because it enhances business performance and increases revenue. An organization can manage project effectively by identifying its goals in applying project management principles (Aladwani, 2002). For most organizations, these goals are to apply a proven practice, optimize resources, serve customer needs and save time and money (Turner & Cochrane, 1993). …

The literature of project success is very wide one. Various articles focus on the evolution of the understanding of project success. Most of the projects we hear of in media are either over budget, late or are simply not good enough and still different lobbies of people claim that those projects have been successful. Neither the practitioners nor the academicians seem to agree on what constitutes project success. It seems to be a rather elusive concept. This paper attempts to put forth the points of views of different researchers in this field and focuses primarily on the factors that affect the project outcome regardless of the type of project. Two sets of factors contributed to successful outcome of a project: the macro and micro factors. A set of macro includes the realm of the owner, while micro factors fall in construction domain. Other factors were grouped into four areas: factors related to: project, project manager and team, organization, and the external environment. More factors were investigated by other researchers, factors including applied methods, individuals in projects, and organizational context. Therefore, every party in the project has its own perception thus forming different criteria of project success. These differences of perception explain the reason why the same project could be considered a success by one and unsuccessful by another.

One of the factors in achieving project success is influenced by the role of a project manager. Project managers (PM) as project leaders are required to have and fulfill the competencies needed to ensure the realization of project management, so that the project is said to be successful. The competency of a project manager according to the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) Sixth Edition (2017) can be measured by three aspects known as The PMI Talent Triangle which consists of Technical Project Management, Leadership Skills, and Strategic and Business Management. This research aims to identify the competence of a project manager whose dominant influence on the success of the project and determine the magnitude of the effect of the application of project manager competencies on the success of construction project. Data were collected through a survey using a questionnaire which was distributed to a total of 30 respondents who are employees of the project. Data analysis was performed by multivariate regression analysis. From the results of the analysis, the regression coefficient values for the Technical Project Management, Leadership Skill and Strategic and Business Management variables were 0.423, 0.097, and 0.437. From the results of the coefficient of determination test, it was found that the influence of project manager competencies on the success of building construction projects was 44%. Keywords: Competency, Construction, Project Manager, Success.

The future of energy mobility involves networks of users, operators, organizations, vehicles, charging stations, communications, materials, transportation corridors, points of service, and so on. The integration of smart grids with plug-in electric vehicle technologies has societal and commercial advantages that include improving grid stability, minimizing dependence on nonrenewable fuels, reducing vehicle emissions, and reducing the cost of electric vehicle ownership. However, ineffective or delayed participation of particular groups of stakeholders could disrupt industry plans and delay the desired outcomes. This article develops a framework to address enterprise resilience for two modes of disruptions-the first being the influence of scenarios on priorities and the second being the influence of multiple groups of stakeholders on priorities. The innovation of this study is to obtain the advantages of integrating two recent approaches: scenario-based preferences modeling and stakeholder mapping. Public agencies, grid operators, plug-in electric vehicle owners, and vehicle manufacturers are the four groups of stakeholders that are considered in this framework, along with the influence of four scenarios on priorities.