Redefining Project Success: Your New Value Framework

The definition of success is constantly evolving. Gone are the days when going live with a project was considered the ultimate achievement. Now, organizations focus on creating continued value and aligning their initiatives with strategic objectives. This shift in perspective is crucial for businesses aiming to stay competitive and deliver meaningful results. 

The Journey Beyond Project Approval

You've just received approval for your business case. The financial benefits have been defined, objectives are set for the project endpoint, and funding is secured. It's an exciting milestone, and the temptation to dive headfirst into execution is strong. When really, this is the perfect time to pause and reflect. 

That sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? The truth is this: Taking the time to reflect on essential the right questions now, allows you to keep up momentum later.  

And if you don’t, you might find yourself six months down the line asking questions like…

• Are we delivering results that people actually care about, or just checking boxes?  
• Will this project still matter to the business six months after it’s completed?  
•  Are we changing outcomes, or just changing processes?

Key Considerations for Measuring Success

Your measurement framework should encompass both quantitative and qualitative measures, recognizing that success isn't solely about data and efficiency. It also involves team morale, innovation, and long-term impact. 

1. Regular Value Measurement: Ensure that you can easily and frequently measure the value you're delivering throughout the project lifecycle. This approach allows you to demonstrate value early and often, keeping stakeholders engaged and confident in the project's progress. 
2. Create a Golden Thread: Establish clear alignment between your work and its impact on the organization's top-level strategic objectives. This connection ensures that your efforts are moving the needle on key success measures and bridging the gap between top-down strategy and bottom-up value delivery. 
3. Foster a Culture of Learning: Build high-performing teams guided by metrics that demonstrate continuous improvement. Aim to deliver better, sooner, safer, and with happier people as you progress through and beyond the initial delivery phase. 
   
   

Defining Value from Your Investments 

North Highland's value framework offers a comprehensive approach to considering your enterprise's strategic objectives while selecting relevant measures for immediate deliverables. When defining value, ask yourself these fundamental questions: 

• Will your initiative improve efficiency without compromising quality? 
• Are you accelerating processes while maintaining content or product quality? 
• Will data quality improve, reducing gaps and minimizing financial and operational risks? 
• Can you deliver a better quality of service, provide solutions to patients sooner, or enhance the safety of your medicines and processes?

Balancing Short-Term Impact with Long-Term Value 

Capturing both immediate impact and sustained value requires you to incorporate a mix of short-term and long-term value measures. That means clearly defining expectations for anticipated outcomes and ensuring they align with strategic goals. Remember the golden thread concept: Every metric or initiative should tie back to something meaningful for the organization. If it doesn't, question whether it represents genuine progress or merely activity. 

Structuring Your Measurement Approach 

Once you've defined your value measurements, it's time to outline how these metrics will be tracked. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. Think: What dashboarding and measurement frameworks already exist for the organization to leverage 

Consider incorporating automation and AI to minimize errors and reduce the administrative burden on PMO teams, allowing for more efficient and reliable reporting. 

When choosing a framework for structuring your measurements, consider options like KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), or Balanced Scorecards. Each framework has its strengths and weaknesses: 

• Strengths: Focuses on measurable outcomes, promotes alignment and transparency, encourages ambitious goals, flexible and adaptable, drives focus and prioritization. 
• Weaknesses: Can be challenging to set effective key results, requires consistent monitoring and adjustment, risk of focusing too narrowly on measurable results.
   

• Strengths: Provides clear, measurable metrics, tracks performance against specific targets, useful for monitoring operational efficiency. 
• Weaknesses: Can lead to a focus on individual metrics rather than overall goals, may not capture strategic or qualitative value, can become stagnant if not updated. 

• Strengths: Provides a holistic view of performance across financial, customer, internal processes, and learning/growth perspectives, aligns strategic objectives with operational activities. 
• Weaknesses: Can be complex and time-consuming to implement, may not be agile enough for rapidly changing environments, can become a static reporting tool. 

Building High-Performing Teams 

Redefining success goes deeper than measuring project or product health. Leaders must also focus on building the capabilities of their resources. The Better, Sooner, Safer, and Happier framework offers an outcome-oriented approach to continuously improve ways of working. This framework aims to complete work at a better quality, sooner than previously possible, with enhanced safety and increased employee morale. 

Better: Focus on reducing defects sprint to sprint and improving the quality of your product or project throughout its lifecycle. 
Sooner: Aim to deliver more user stories sprint to sprint, achieve quicker time to market, and accelerate development timelines. 
Safer: Maintain patient trust, balance speed with control in drug development and delivery, and foster a culture of continuous risk assessment and mitigation. 
Happier: Enhance both patient satisfaction with developed products and employee engagement by creating a work environment that encourages innovation and experimentation while maintaining high safety standards. 

Sharing Insights and Understanding Stakeholders

Now you've established a solid framework for measuring value, it's time to share your insights. Remember that success and value are not one-size-fits-all concepts – their definitions vary across leadership, employees, customers, and investors. To ensure alignment and transparency: 

• Tailor communication for different stakeholder groups, focusing on what matters most to each. 
• Embed feedback loops to continuously refine your success measures. 
• Drive decision-making with data and insights, adjusting initiatives when needed. 
• Make success tangible by clearly articulating why your framework is impactful and actionable. 
• Use engaging narratives, case studies, and data visualization to bring your success story to life. 
  

Insufficient frameworks are costing you more than you realize—don't waste any more resources on initiatives that hit arbitrary targets but miss the true mark. When you redefine success beyond project completion, you transform how your organization creates and captures value. The question isn't whether you can afford to invest time in building better success measures. It's whether you can afford not to.