THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF PROJECT SUCCESS DIMENSIONS

Traditionally, the success of a project is assessed using internal mea sures such as technical and operational goals, and meeting schedule an d budget, More recently, it has been recognized that several other mea sures should be used to define project success, These measures reflect external effectiveness: the project's impact on its customers, and on the developing organization itself, In our study of 110 defense proje cts performed by Israeli industry, we used a multidimensional approach to measure the success of defense projects, Based on previous studies , we defined four dimensions of success: meeting design goals; benefit s to the customer; benefits to the developing organization; and benefi ts to the defense and national infrastructure, For each project, we as ked three different stakeholders (the customer, the developing organiz ation, and the coordinating office within the Ministry of Defense) for their views on the relative importance of these dimensions of success , Analysis of the data revealed that the dimension benefits to the cus tomer is by far the most important success dimension, The second in im portance is meeting design goals, The other two dimensions are relativ ely unimportant.