We’ve all been involved in project management, whether in the workplace or at home. We’ve also experienced the much-dreaded project failure. Why does it happen to us and what did we miss? In K-12, schools not only need to meet state standards, but they have to prepare students for the workforce, college, and life. With the many expectations, it’s crucial and necessary to have solid planning, execution, and measurements in place to ensure those expectations are met and exceeded.

One of the more important factors to the success of a project is establishing success criteria. Our partnership with schools focuses on building success criteria through alignment to a District’s mission, vision and goals. At e2L, we use methodologies to document project deliverable success criteria with a focus on the performance and function of the deliverables. Our simple formula establishes success criteria in collaboration with District stakeholders and removes any doubt of what the project expectations are and what we will measure.

Identify Success Criteria

Identify the success criteria using the project objectives and deliverables as a starting point. Look at the agreed-upon success criteria by all stakeholders and how they are going to be measured. It’s also important to  name the person who has oversight of the measurement and who is the foundation of project success.

Success Factors

Include success factors during your project planning of success criteria. These factors are calculated to produce success. Identifying resources early on ensures you have the right subject matter experts and resources to contribute to the overall success of the project. Oftentimes, when success factors are not identified, there are delays during project execution that hinder and even stop projects from moving forward.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

KPIs provide the opportunity for continuous monitoring of the success criteria. A major benefit of KPIs allow you to track and report project status along the way. The goal is to identify KPIs that depict the overall expectation and big picture of the project.

This simple formula for building success criteria reaps major rewards. Project success is staying within scope, schedule and costs while creating value for your school district. Creating success criteria that is targeted against District goals, inclusive of the appropriate success factors, and measured can deliver stakeholder expectations.