PAPERS Forecasting Success on Large Projects: …

1 PAPERSP roject Management Journal DOI: 1 INTRODUCTION Large projects have an impact that can go well beyond the immediatecompletion of the project (Eweje, Turner, & M ller, 2012; Xue, 2009). Success is perceived not just by the traditional view of completing thework to time, cost, and quality, but also by whether the project deliv-ers the desired outcome that is, to deliver to the parent organizationdesired new capabilities and business objectives (Office of GovernmentCommerce, 2007; Xue, 2009) and whether it achieves the desired longer-term impacts (Xue, 2009), including delivering the parent organization sstrategic objectives (Eweje et al., 2012), and desired future development ofthe business (Shenhar & Dvir, 2007).

2 Large projects will have a wider range of stakeholders making judgments about whether the project and its output,outcome, and impact have achieved the desired objectives, and these stake-holders will make those judgments over the months, years, and evendecades following project perception of Success by a project s stakeholders often has little to dowith whether the project was completed on time, at cost, and with thedesired quality. There are well-known cases of projects that were substan-tially late and overspent but were later perceived to be very successful. TheSydney Opera House and Thames Barrier (Morris & Hough, 1987) are twoexamples.

3 Meanwhile, other projects have been completed on time and atcost but have left their investors dissatisfied because they have failed todeliver the desired benefits. The Sydney Cross-City Tunnel for road traffic isone example. What this illustrates is that the wretched golden triangle ofproject Success (time, cost, and quality) is an inadequate indicator of projectsuccess, and that Success is not just related to completion of the project sscope of work, but also to the achievement of business objectives ( , theproject delivers the desired outputs, outcomes, and impacts, that differentstakeholders assess these different levels of project Success , and that they doso over different time frames).

4 The aim of this research is to develop a set of leading performance indi-cators for Large projects that can be measured during project delivery to pre-dict project Success . Project Success is measured not just by completion ofthe scope of work to time, cost, and quality, but also by performance of theproject s outputs, outcomes, and impacts, and thereby the achievement ofthe desired business objectives, as assessed by different stakeholders overForecasting Success on Large Projects: Developing Reliable Scales to PredictMultiple Perspectives by MultipleStakeholders Over Multiple Time FramesRodney Turner, SKEMA Business School, Universit Lille Nord de France, Lille, FranceRoxanne Zolin, School of Management, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane,AustraliaABSTRACT Our aim is to develop a set of leading performance indica-tors to enable managers of Large projects to forecast during project execution how various stakeholders willperceive Success months or even years into the operationof the output.

5 Large projects have many stakeholders whohave different objectives for the project, its output, andthe business objectives they will deliver. The output of alarge project may have a lifetime that lasts for years, oreven decades, and ultimate impacts that go beyond itsimmediate operation. How different stakeholders perceivesuccess can change with time, and so the project manag-er needs leading performance indicators that go beyondthe traditional triple constraint to forecast how key stake-holders will perceive Success months or even years this article, we develop a model for project Success thatidentifies how project stakeholders might perceive suc-cess in the months and years following a project.

6 We iden-tify Success or failure factors that will facilitate or mitigateagainst achievement of those Success criteria, and a setof potential leading performance indicators that forecasthow stakeholders will perceive Success during the life ofthe project s output. We conducted a scale developmentstudy with 152 managers of Large projects and identifiedtwo project Success factor scales and seven stakeholdersatisfaction scales that can be used by project managersto predict stakeholder satisfaction on projects and so maybe used by the managers of Large projects for the basis ofproject : project Success criteria; proj-ect Success factors; project failure factors;leading performance indicators; stakeholders;project complexityProject Management Journal 2012 by the Project Management InstitutePublished online in Wiley Online Library( ).

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