Hello again. We've learned about the differences between launching and landing, and we've also learned about the differences between delivering your project and finding out if the outcome performs as expected. But how exactly do you know that your project is a success? How do you know if you've actually landed? At the beginning of the project, you defined goals and deliverables that are measurable—meaning that you can determine if they were met. Similarly, you need to define success criteria that can also be measured so you'll know whether they were met. The success criteria will tell you whether or not the project as a whole was successful. They are the specific details of your goals and deliverables that tell you whether you've accomplished what you set out to do. They are the standards by which the project will be judged once it's been delivered to stakeholders and customers. Defining success criteria also clarifies for your team what they're trying to accomplish beyond just launching something to users. Is it to increase customer satisfaction with the service so they can continue to purchase more products? Enhance an existing feature to retain customers? Depending on the project, the answers will be different. But, it's important that a team is aligned and working towards a shared goal. Sometimes forcing the conversation and clarifying what the end result looks like can bring to light questions and areas of disagreement. There isn't a set process for determining success criteria, but I'll break down a couple of key points to consider. Remember the measurable part of your SMART goals? One of the questions to ask when making your goals measurable is: How will I know when it is accomplished? The same question applies to your project: How will you know when it's done? Only in this case, you want to ask: How will I know when it's successfully accomplished? You can measure to determine your project success in a similar way to measuring a goal. So go through your project goals and deliverables, review the scope, and identify the measurable aspects of your project. These are going to be any of the metrics used in the goals and deliverables, along with your budget and schedule details. Another thing you'll need to do is get clarity from stakeholders on the project requirements and expectations. This is key! There are lots of people involved with any project, and that means lots of ideas about what success looks like to each person. You'll want to ask questions, such as: Who ultimately says whether or not the project is successful? What criteria will be measured to determine success? What's the success of this project based on? Once you've collected clarifying information, document and share all of it so that you, your team, and your stakeholders can refer to it later. Let's try creating success criteria with the Office Green project. For example, the goal is to increase revenue by 5% by the end of the year. One of the deliverables is a website with a gallery of the different plant selections that are offered. It's not enough just to make a list of criteria; you need a process for measuring success from start to finish throughout the entire project life cycle. This way, you can make adjustments and ensure success by the time you're ready to land. There are many metrics you can use, and for some products, it will make sense to use more than one. The metrics you choose should be as closely aligned to your project's goal as possible. For example, "happiness metrics" measure user attitudes and satisfaction, or perceived ease of use, and you can measure these through surveys. For the Plant Pals project, we may consider a customer satisfaction rate of 85% within the first three months of launching as a way to measure success. You can also consider customer adoption and engagement metrics, along with more business-oriented metrics that track things like sales and growth. Adoption refers to how the customer uses and adopts a product or service without any issues. Engagement refers to how often or meaningful customer interaction and participation is over time. Adoption metrics might include launching a new product to a group of users and having a high amount of them use or adopt it. Engagement metrics might include increasing the daily usage of a design feature or increasing orders and customer interactions. Using the Office Green example, tracking how many customers initially sign up for and use to Plant Pals service is an adoption metric. Tracking how many customers renew their Plant Pals service, post about it, or share feedback are engagement metrics. Once you've defined the metrics that you'll be measuring, think about how you track these metrics. Evaluate which tools can help you collect the data you need to ensure you're staying on track. For example, if you're measuring business metrics like revenue, consider tracking that in a spreadsheet or dashboard, where you can easily spot gaps and trends. If you're measuring customer satisfaction, you can think of a way to incentivize customers to participate in regular email surveys and create a system to measure their responses when they participate. You can also utilize your project management tools to check on efficiency metrics, like what percent of tasks are completed or whether the project is progressing alongside the planned timelines. It's smart to measure success with your team as a project or product is in progress. For example, you can hold a project review once a month, have team members complete task checklists by certain deadlines, or hold live feedback sessions with your users or customers. There are many different ways to measure success. The key is to pick the methods that work best for your success criteria. It's a good idea that, along with each success criteria on your list, to also include the methods for how success will be measured, how often it's measured, and who's responsible for measuring it. Share your success criteria document with your stakeholders and ask if they agree with how the project's success will be determined. It's also a good idea to have the appropriate stakeholders sign off on the success criteria. This way, everyone will be clear on who is responsible for which tasks, and you'll all thoroughly understand what the path to success entails. Keep this documentation visible throughout the duration of the project and clearly communicate it with your team every step of the way. They're the ones who will be attempting to meet all the different requirements, so don't keep them in the dark about what they're supposed to do or how they're supposed to do it. If done correctly, defining your success criteria should create greater alignment within the team and give everybody better visibility into how to achieve success. Clarity around success metrics also helps teams prioritize which efforts are most impactful to their users. Defining project success is a complex but crucial part of project management. With more and more practice, this process will come more naturally to you in the planning stages and throughout your project. We'll continue exploring and talking more about these concepts throughout the course. Nice job! You're almost done with Module 2. I'll see you in a bit to review what we've covered.
