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As an organization, success can be a challenge to define. Even if your work is highly focused, you’re likely to be navigating complex processes and competing priorities on a regular basis. A big-picture view can help to put it all in perspective: if you’re meeting the goals you set for yourself, that’s usually a good sign. In that sense, projects offer a simple way to gauge the health and effectiveness of your organization. If your projects represent your strategic goals, then achieving them is a pretty good proxy for progress.
But a lot of factors go into project success. Projects are complex undertakings that need a strong infrastructure to support them: knowledgeable and empowered team members, strong lines of communication, clear vision. And even project outcomes can be murky. If a project delivered on its objectives, but was over budget or delayed… was it a success?
A recent study by The Project Management Institute (PMI) into project success distilled a working definition of the idea from thousands of survey responses: “Successful projects deliver value that was worth the effort and expense.” It’s a definition that is both product-oriented, by its focus on “value,” and process-oriented. Project success demands a high-quality outcome, but however strong the finished product is, success is still moderated by what it costs to achieve.
In short, although what you accomplish is important, almost as important is how you accomplish it.
If effort and expense are essential factors in project success, then consistently delivering successful projects requires understanding what they are and how they influence the final value of a project. As it stands, “effort” and “expense” are general concepts, and to create a repeatable recipe for project success, we need to figure out a way to first quantify and then optimize them.
Project management experts have elaborated on the idea of the traditional “triple constraint” over the years, but even in its base form, it can help tease apart the relationship between effort, expense, and project deliverables. The classic “triple constraint” of projects is scope, time, and cost: i.e., what you’re doing, how long it will take, and what you will spend to get it.
With the triple constraint as a jumping-off point, we can start to expand on the concrete, measurable project characteristics that color our assessment of “effort and expense.” These are variables like:
These more tangible, visible project metrics are where the rubber meets the road of delivering value. Here, leaders have the leverage to impact project outcomes.
Controlling specific aspects of your project in a holistic way, from start to finish and in coordination with the rest of the project as a whole, gives you the best chance of high-quality outcomes. Strategies for managing these project variables fall broadly into three buckets:
Each bucket is important on its own, but all three are necessary for consistently successful projects. And while each bucket requires some unique support in order to be effective, they all share a need for one critical resource: information.
Historical data and real-time transparency are crucial for building a project plan and for keeping it on track. For that reason, a robust, fully featured knowledge platform is the ideal foundation for strong project performance. Learning management systems—like Pinnacle Series LMS—are purpose-built to capture, store, and share information intuitively and flexibly, which makes every aspect of project management simpler and more streamlined.
Research shows that careful project planning lays the groundwork for eventual success. With a well-formed plan, you’re able to set accurate expectations with clients, the project team, and the rest of the organization. And when stakeholders know what to expect, they’re more likely to be prepared for the costs and satisfied with the result.
Crafting a timeline and a budget for your project involves a certain amount of prediction. Project managers have to anticipate how long tasks will take, and forecast the cost of materials and labor over the life of the project. In these moments, an LMS can be a valuable resource for historical data to help hone your predictions. Consult prior project data and find out how long a similar job took, for example, and cross-check it against the skillsets of the employees who were assigned to it.
Your timeline and budget also depend heavily on the resources available for the project. With more (or more experienced) hands, a project might take less time—but it also might cost more. A detailed LMS like Pinnacle Series surfaces in-depth information about employee skills, which can be referenced against other company data, allowing you to take employee strengths and limitations into account and assign them to the project in ways that will make the best use of them.
Once your project plan is solidified, an LMS provides the perfect platform to publicize it. As a shared cultural touchpoint within your organization, an LMS offers a way to communicate readily with your entire workforce and reinforce organizational goals and values. And the same is true on a smaller scale within project teams. When you can make mission statements and project planning materials readily available for reference, projects are more likely to stay on task and progress efficiently.
At the same time, project team members face fewer distractions with a quality LMS available to them. If team members run up against a process question or need to reinforce an essential skill, they can do so at their own pace, within the flow of work. Within Pinnacle Series, AI-enhanced search and intuitive navigation make finding information straightforward, so users don’t have to put down what they’re doing to scour the internet or check with a colleague.
And when learning is an essential part of your project, an LMS provides the tools to track and report on progress in depth. Your project might require users to complete a training on work methods or site safety, or your goal might be for your workforce to gain a certain level of skill. Pinnacle Series offers tools to assign learning content and track both its utilization and completion, keeping you up to date on your project’s status in real time.
Although the goal is to prepare for as many contingencies as possible, setbacks are a fact of life in project management. When they do occur, it’s often due to insufficient information or a lack of transparency—but sometimes, completely unexpected events can upend a project and force you to reassess.
Setbacks frequently come in the form of errors. The client may have changed the design, or a worker used an outdated process, and the end result is that the work needs to be redone. Rework is a costly factor in a project’s success or failure—maybe even costlier than it seems at first glance. Studies in the construction industry show that on top of the clear blow to project efficiency—doing twice as much work to accomplish the same task—over time, rework can add up to a sizable profit loss over the life of your organization.
An LMS cuts down on rework by keeping documentation and reference materials ready at hand for workers. As a knowledge capture platform, it also collects the latest updates and makes them accessible to stakeholders, acting as a single source of truth in what can be a confusing, multi-threaded project communication ecosystem.
Being ready to change course when the situation calls for it, however, demands more than skilled project management. It’s not just the project plan that has to adapt—it’s your workforce. At the end of the day, plans are executed by people, and the more skillful and flexible those people can be, the faster your organization as a whole can adapt.
Research from the Project Management Institute recognizes the benefits of employee support for project success. The Pulse of the Profession 2024 report identifies a range of “enablers” that, when present in an organization, raise the average rate of project performance by more than eight percentage points (76.7%, up from 68.4%). The improvement is greatest for organizations offering three or more enablers, which include factors like:
Offering three or more enablers also significantly reduces the percentage of projects that experience scope creep (39% to 28%) and the percentage of the project budget lost for failed projects (31% to 25%).
The data is clear: when employees have the right resources, projects fare significantly better. And those resources are exactly the ones that an LMS is designed to deliver. With access to a robust LMS, employees can learn both subject-matter skills and the soft skills—like communication, planning, and resilience—that make projects run more smoothly.
An LMS cultivates a culture of learning, in which asking questions is encouraged and employee development is an explicit goal. And a learning culture opens the door to continuous improvement, both for employees personally and for organizational processes—a feature that shines through in project success.
By the same token, neglecting training and its related resources can incur major costs. Training is a valued benefit for today’s workers, and without it, employees can feel unmotivated and dissatisfied. They may fail to take full advantage of the tools that are available to them, causing work quality to suffer. At worst, unhappy workers might even leave your organization, saddling you with all the ordinary costs of turnover as well as, if they were part of the project team, a significant project setback.
A flexible, powerful LMS is an asset to project managers, and also to your workforce as a whole. Pinnacle Series is designed to consolidate the expertise that exists within your organization, making it a foundation that your employees can share in and build upon.
Beyond centralizing information and streamlining communication, Pinnacle Series offers a wide range of learning tools to connect users with content in a tailored, efficient experience. You can leverage skill assessments to create hyper-relevant learning paths, or adapt an existing course to an individual user’s strengths and gaps. Incorporate content from leading industry software providers to ensure your workforce stays up to date on the very latest technology.
An LMS is an essential tool for delivering on your projects consistently. But Pinnacle Series is more than an LMS—it’s a brain for your organization. Request a demonstration today, and explore what kind of thinking it can do for you.
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