I've had these floating around for a while, but figured I'd bash them out here to make them "public". Also I was recently at an IT Strategy conference, and noticed that a Gartner model of IT strategy included at least two of these in the "success evaluation" section. I was proud.
These were inspired by mealy-mouthed project managers that claimed another "success" regardless of the usability of what was delivered - pointing at the Critical Success Factors they'd managed to influence to be the metrics used to gauge success.
So these are Dave's Critical Failure Factors - if you get a "no" on any of these, then I think you failed; and I don't care what other metrics you have that show you succeeded - you didn't...
1) Did you improve the business's capability to operate?
This could be rephrased as "Are my customers happier now than they were?". Can the users of whatever it was you delivered do what they used to be able to do more easily? Can they do new things that they wanted to be able to do, and do them in the way they wanted to do them?
I'd like to carry out a quick surveymonkey survey of the users to gauge whether what was delivered made their lives better - almost a single question: "Is the world a better place now this delivery has happened?" would suffice, but I figure I could bulk it out a bit with a bit of imagination.
2) Did you deliver a supportable, strategic asset?
There are two key words in here: "supportable" and "strategic". They're closely related, which is why this is a a single Critical Failure Factor rather than two separate ones - things that are strategic tend to be more supportable. Conversely - if you've delivered something unsupportable, it's probably not strategic either.
"Supportable" means "Did you make life better for the people in support who have to look after the service you delivered?". Does it work? Is it stable? Does it need babying along and continually standing up when it falls over? Does it all work together with everything else, or are there daily tweaks to make it talk to legacy system x? Again, I'd do a quick surveymonkey, asking essentially the same question: "Is the world a better place now this delivery has happened?" - only this time I'd survey the people charged with supporting what you delivered.
Remember, your project is an investment the company is making - the company has been out, convinced the bank that the project will increase the value of the company and borrowed the money to do it. You are delivering a new asset - something that increases the value of the company so much that they can pay back that money they borrowed to do the project.
Those guys in support are not an asset, they are a cost. They cost the company money just to keep the lights on, and your delivery of something that needs more of them or more time from them is a straightforward cost that the business can do without.
"Strategic" means "is it aligned to the strategic roadmap?" - or perhaps better: "Did this delivery take us in the right direction?". You might have a nice strategy, but typically that strategy will be delivered by individual projects, as projects provide the energy and structure necessary to make something happen.
Jim Crookes, chief architect at BT said "It's a lot easier to tack your way forward than to row into the teeth of the wind..."*. There's a good chance that factors such as money and time will mean that the project does not deliver exactly in line with strategy, but you can deliver something that takes you in the right direction. So - go ask the architects: "Is the world a better place now this delivery has happened?"
3) Did you finish?
This should be the easiest - and to be honest, if what you're doing is delivering a brand new capability on a greenfield site, then it can be. "Did you finish?" means things like "Is it handed over to support?" and "Are the users all trained up and all using the system?". It means "Can the delivery team walk away?".
But nine times out of ten you're not delivering a brand new shiny capability with no old system to migrate people off and decommission - and that's where this, I swear, becomes the hardest Failure Factor to achieve, and the hardest thing to actually get built into a project as PMs are darn scared of this one.
In these, overwhelmingly more common, cases "Did you finish?" means "did you actually migrate all the users off the old system and onto the new one, and (critically) TURN OFF the old system?".
Has the old system gone? Gone properly - software turned off and hardware decommissioned. Not nearly gone - how often do you hear this: "Oh well, yes we've delivered but we've had to leave the old system running for a bit while we ..." <-- FAIL.
You've finished when you've finished - the new system is in, everyone's using it and the thing it was supposed to replace has been properly and totally decommissioned.
Feel free to adapt, adopt - or just ignore if you're a project manager :)
* Jim Crookes, quoted in Enterprise Architecture As Strategy - Ross, Weill & Robertson; Harvard Business Press 2006
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