You’re trying to improve your project’s success rate. How can you measure the impact of your changes?

I recommend focusing on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as cost efficiency, time savings, customer satisfaction, and productivity metrics. These KPIs provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of the changes. Collecting data involves gathering quantitative metrics like budget variance, project completion time, customer feedback scores, and team productivity statistics. Additionally, qualitative data from surveys, interviews, and reviews with stakeholders can provide valuable context and insights into their experiences. It's important to look for patterns, trends, and correlations in the data to understand the true impact of the changes.

You measure the impact of your changes by defining a good success criteria and choose your success indicators.The best way to enhance performance is to learn and improve from the mistakes you had made.

The most common factor leading to project failure is a lack of clear goals. So starting early on, identify your Objectives and Key Results well (OKRs) based on all available data, and communicate these to everyone, and keep communicating the metrics you're using to evaluate progress. Asana says "While most companies set goals, only 16% of knowledge workers say their company is effective at setting and communicating company goals." That's a staggeringly low number, and you can't benefit from the subject matter expertise of your teams if they don't comprehensively understand the needs, objectives, and performance metrics you're using. Don't be afraid to adapt either. Re-evaluate your goals based on new information if need be.

Adopt a needs-based approach to your success indicators, rather than a visibility-based approach. What that means is, find what is vital to your outcomes and focus on those, not necessarily on what you can merely measure. You can always find secondary ways to measure an important objective. Success Indicators are often set by people who may not understand the real needs of the project. Increasing website traffic by 20% is a performance indicator, but if website traffic doesn't include any understanding of market reach, retention, where traffic is coming from, and durability metrics, then incentivizing workers to chase that number will degrade overall performance.

In my experience, keeping track of your project as it goes is like using a GPS on a road trip. It helps you know if you're on the right path or need to reroute. Setting up simple checkpoints from the start and comparing your progress regularly makes sure you're always moving towards your destination and can quickly adjust if you're off track.

Post-Mortems and evaluations are crucial for developing better processes for the future. Learn from what you've gone through, succeed or fail, by identifying major problems, major lucky breaks, and any and all "things according to schedule" so you can figure out how to better identify and account for key performance indicators in your next project. Nobody will know your place in your business or industry or market better than you, so innovation and re-evaluation gives you the awareness of how you fit in (and where your opportunities are) that nobody else can tell you. Communication across all channels, and at all levels of the organization, can really help here too. Don't take things for granted, you need to identify all success factors!