Key Success Drivers for Large High-Technology Projects: Prediction and Practice

Introduction

Despite present global financial constraints, the world is currently in an era of great innovation realised through many large science/engineering projects (e.g. the Large Hadron Collider, the ITER Fusion Reactor, and the Square Kilometre Array). These breakthrough projects, by their nature, have inherent high-risk, yet their international scale and huge cost implications demand that success measures are achieved and project performance is maximised. Many modern studies (Jugdev & Müller, 2005; Williams et al., 2009; ICCPM, 2011; Crosby, 2012c) show that traditional (i.e. PMBoK style) project management and execution techniques alone are insufficient to meet the demands placed on complex high-tech mega-projects. A fuller understanding of success drivers, professionally applied in the early stages, is required to lift project performance.

My original meta-study (Crosby, 2012a) of project success factors (based on analyses of 2820 cases) concluded that sound project management control and execution systems, and a clear project definition and goal set, are by far the two most important drivers of project success. Competent information management systems ranked third in importance followed by 15 other significant factors empirically shown to improve project outcomes (See Table 1). Many of these success drivers are wholly or partly newly ranked ‘soft’ drivers, indicating the importance of leadership, motivation, expectations, and team engagement. The study findings encouraged further research to benchmark the performance of contemporary large engineering and science projects against the reported strategic drivers to further our knowledge of factors for project success.