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Success Factors Discovery

Explore tools, archives, and resources to build your expertise.

Tools

“Build Your Own Success Factors” – Link to interactive quiz/tool and step-by-step guide.

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Discovery Vault

“Browse Every Success Factors Discovery Issue” – Full searchable collection of past frameworks and tips.

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Apply Quick Fixes

“Real-World Project Scenarios & What Works” – ‘Jobs To Be Done’, with Success Factors from expert experience.

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External Resources

Find further learning on the topic of projects and Success Factors.

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Community & Support

“Get Help & Share Wins” – Join the forum, ask questions, connect with other project pros.

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Imagine going to your CEO…

They tell you that projects make up over 30% of the work. They recognize that the strategy isn’t going to get delivered unless they deliver better projects.

Then they ask you: “What’s the most important thing to get right?”

The Role Play
“The first principle for successful projects is Stewardship—acting responsibly with integrity, care, and trustworthiness while maintaining compliance.”
Can you imagine how they might look at you?
What you’re saying isn’t wrong. But it feels like a disconnection.
They want to know what makes projects successful, not just general principles for project management. It is a big difference.
The Context

This example of stewardship is the first of the PMI’s 12 Principles. This isn’t a dig at the PMI or others. It simply illustrates a point: how we define the foundations for success matters.

So What?

Try this instead: Tell the CEO you’ve spoken to everyone who delivers projects, and the first principle for success is asking why and ensuring we have a clear purpose.

That’s a Success Factor with immediate applicability.

The Difference Between Success
and Successful Management

First, Let’s Define “Success”

Before we can find the factors for success, we have to agree on what we’re aiming for. In project work, there’s a critical difference between two types of success:

• Project Management Success: This is the well understood measure of efficiency. It asks, “Did we complete the project on time, on budget, and within scope?”

• Project Success: This is a broader, more strategic view. It asks, “Did the project achieve its overall goal, deliver real benefits, and satisfy our key stakeholders?”

Our focus here is entirely on Project Success. We’re looking beyond the process to find the ingredients for delivering real, lasting value.

Getting the Language Right

The terms used to describe success are often jumbled, leading to confusion. Let’s clarify the three key ideas:

  • Success Criteria: These are your specific goals. They define what “good” looks like for your project (e.g., “The new system must be adopted by 90% of the sales team”).
  • KPIs (Key Performance Indicators): These are the metrics you use to track progress toward your criteria (e.g., “Weekly active user count”).
  • Success Factors: These are the essential conditions that enable success. In behavioural science, they’re known as heuristics. Commonly described as ‘fast and frugal rules of thumb’ that experts use to simplify complex decisions.
    When a seasoned project leader says, ‘Get the team right,’ they’re sharing a powerful heuristic forged from experience. We call them Success Factors because that’s what they do: they create success.

We use the term Success Factors because it’s simple, clear, and focuses on what truly matters.

How to Think About Them

Think of Success Factors as:

  • The enablers of your project.
  • The foundational things you must do.
  • The essential activities that must go right for the project to flourish.

A project might succeed without them, but it’s far more likely to succeed with them.

The Three Main Types of
Success Factor

Success Factors are not a “one-size-fits-all” list. They generally fall into three categories:

  • Project Factors: These are specific to the work being done and can differ by industry, company, or even the individual project.
  • People Factors: These relate to the individuals involved. They include skills like leadership, communication, and teamwork.
  • Place Factors: This is about the organisational environment. It includes your company’s culture, values, and systems, which are influential even if outside your direct control.

The Bottom Line

Success Factors are the handful of things that truly drive success and help you avoid failure. Our goal is to identify the ones with the most substantial influence and focus on them relentlessly.

Your Discovery Steps

Find further learning on the topic of projects and Success Factors.

Step 1: Uncover What You Already Know

The first step is to tease out the learned knowledge that you and other experts already possess. It starts with a simple question:

“What do you do in practice to be successful?”

When you ask this, you’re not just gathering tips; you’re conducting a practical inquiry into decision-making. You are uncovering personal heuristics.

Nobel Prize-winning research and studies at institutions like Oxford University show that expert leaders operate on a handful to a few dozen of these powerful rules.

Crucially, they often do this without consciously realising it, the knowledge is so deeply embedded it becomes intuitive.

Step 2: Go Beyond Experience

Tapping into this hard-won knowledge is a vital starting point. However, relying on experience alone has a critical limitation:

→ It can’t see what isn’t there.

You risk missing the underlying root causes of success and failure that even experienced people aren’t consciously aware of.

To take your Success Factors to the next level, you must combine the wisdom of experience with a forensic analysis of why projects truly fail.

This allows you to understand what even the experts might be missing.

The Key Message

When we combine the heuristics drawn from lived experience with an analysis of the root causes of project failure, we get something special: a clear view of the Success Factors required to deliver Project Success.

Once identified, make applying the Success Factors your laser focus. Consider:

  • Self-Assessment: Immediately assess your project against  the success factors. If you’re weak against any, identify something you can do immediately to address the gap. Then take action.
  • Guiding Planning: Building the activities to deliver the success factors into your plan
  • Filtering Decisions: Using them as a checklist for every key decision. If a proposed action doesn’t support a Success Factor, it should be challenged or rejected.
  • Build them: Share  yours with your colleagues, during the project retrospectives or lessons learned, ask people to identify what their success factors were. Build this into an system for learning and refining success factors within your project, then team, organisation and beyond.

Immediate Game Changing Impact

Unlock the step-by-step method for creating powerful Success Factors tailored to your project or personal growth.

Know This Block

Know This

💡

There are few things that can have a more immediate and transformational impact on your projects, than writing down what works for you.

You have the Experience!

You have the experience, you just need to become aware of it.

  • The Latin root of Experience = ‘experior’
  • The Latin root of Experiment = ‘experior’
  • The Latin root of Expert = ‘experior’

Do this:

  • Write them down.
  • Stick them to your wall.
  • Make them your desktop background.

You’ve already experimented with working on projects. That’s learned experience, it’s golden.

You are already an EXPERT at what you do.

Write down your Success Factors > Become aware of your expertise. > Believe in your Success Factors.

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