Every project and programme was initiated for a reason – in the main to answer a problem or take advantage of an opportunity. In healthcare, this could mean the problem of administration costs (resolved by recording information on a computer system so that it is written once and read many times) or the opportunity because of new knowledge (eg keyhole surgery was a new concept a few years ago, and improves operation success rate and patient experience, and also reduces costs dramatically.
Most projects or programmes have a single primary purpose, no matter how many additional benefits they create. However sometimes the primary purpose is not simple (eg keyhole surgery example given above), and a project may have a number of Project Success Criteria (PSC), which if they are met or exceeded, will mean that the project is a success. Very often the bar is set quite low – a reduction in hospital bed days following keyhole surgery, vs conventional (old-fashioned open) surgery, could be relatively easy to achieve, even though in financial terms the return on investment may be very high (ie the savings made in financial terms may exceed the cost of implementing the change by many times). Consequently you should expect to exceed the minimum PSC, sometimes by a long way.
Unfortunately many projects don’t have defined PSC. We don’t know what we wanted to achieve, so we probably haven’t achieved it.
So PSC are a measure of whether a project has succeeded. There’s another side to this.
Critical Success Factors (CSF) are the enablers or the things that have to be in place and/or work, for the project to achieve its PSC. CSF are required so that PSC can be delivered (Gomes & Romão, 2016; Jenner, 2014).
For example, if the intention is that all clinical activities will be recorded in the at the point of care, then a CSF would be that the means to record the clinical activities will be available. If clinical rooms don’t have computers (or the computers aren’t available to the clinician, or don’t connect to the relevant clinical system), then it’s physically impossible to record clinical activities electronically. Other CSFs could include training, willingness of staff to participate, consent from patients and service users, in addition to the ICT factors.
There are various diagrams of Project Success, including Jenner’s Greek Temple (Jenner, 2014) and the Cranfield process (Lahmann et al., 2016; Ward & Daniel, 2005) but these are complicated and should be explored once the practitioner is comfortable rather than at the start.
In summary of this section: CSF facilitate achievement & PSC measure success (Gomes & Romão, 2016)
