By Marshall Shovein, Rulesware Vice President 

I just got back from a meeting with the CFO for one of our clients and want to share some interesting insight I took away about ways to evaluate a project’s success.

At Rulesware, we’ve recently finished up four projects with this client, all of which we delivered early and with no defects. That’s a combination that almost always pleases a company’s management. The business users were also thrilled with what they received–especially since they increased their productivity beyond expectations.

On top of all this, we delivered all the projects well under budget!

The CFO was just shaking his head when we met. We asked him what was on his mind and he said that he had never seen such results from any project since he had been with the company.

Impressive Results Were Not Our Greatest Achievement

But here’s the interesting thing: he said that while all the results were amazing and unsurpassed, he felt the greatest achievement was that we showed his company that they could be successful.

He explained that it wasn’t just the fact that the individual projects were successful–but rather that with these results he felt like we were going to instil a new level of confidence in the organization.

He said it was a renewed confidence among his team that they can take on complicated, tough challenges and be successful. That it was a confidence that they can be competitive in the marketplace.

I think we all tend to evaluate project success in terms of scope, timeliness, budget and quality. And these are unquestionably important things to evaluate.

But just maybe this CFO is measuring ‘success’ in a more important way.