Assessing Project Success: Moving Beyond the Triple Constraint

This paper reviews the literature on IS project success evaluation and finds that the concept of success as currently used in both academia and practice based on the notion of the “triple constraint” – project scope, budget and schedule. This notion of success, derived from engineering, implicitly separates the project to develop the IT artifact from its implementation in the work system it is intended to serve. Additionally, it leads to relativism and lack of direction for project managers. Following Alter (2003), this paper proposes a new conception of project success based on the performance of the IT enabled work system. This conception is shown to be objective, transparent to non-IT managers and to provide direction to project managers in handling changes to projects.