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How to manage your project’s critical success factors

Risks are potential threats to the success of your project; Critical Success Factors (CSFs) are pre-requisites for success.

Risks are managed by the project team; CSFs are managed by the governance team. This is why they are so often missed altogether until it is too late.

This Guide provides a simple process for identifying and then managing CSFs so that the pre-requisites to success are known, tracked and managed. Obvious, but too often not done well.
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What needs to exist or go right for your project to be successful that are outside the control of the project team? These are CSFs. As, by definition, they are critical to the success of the project - they need need to be known and managed.

And managed by the governance team. So they need to 

  • know what CSFs are and how they are different to risks
  • have the tools to identify, process and manage the CSFs
  • support and run CSF identification workshops
  • have a mechanism for tracking and reporting CSFs.

CSFs can include project funding, resourcing, business capacity, economic conditions, interest rate and more. Some CSFs can be managed (eg funding) and others only monitored (eg interest rates). What is important is that they are known, tracked and responded to as required.

This Guide provides you with a basis for taking the governance tam through the CSF identification process and then equipping them to manage them on an ongoing basis. 

Currently, too often, CSFs are ignored and then when they don’t exist or happen everyone is surprised (and often points the finger at the project team). We put the accountability where it needs to be - on the governance team - but now also equip them to fulfill their role.

  1. Understanding critical success factors
  2. The end-to-end critical success factors management process
  3. How to identify your critical success factors
  4. How to manage your critical success factors
  5. How to assess and plan your CSFs
  6. Example CSF management strategy
  7. Example CSF management plan
  8. How to take action on CSFs
  9. How to report on CSFs
  • Governance teams - to understand the nature and role of CSFs and how they are accountable for them
  • Project teams - to understand the difference between CSFs and risks and to ensure they are being managed 
  • PPMOs - to understand the nature and role of CSFs and be able to coordinate them across the portfolio of projects
  • Project Investment Committee/Board - to understand the nature and role of CSFs and ensure they are being dealt with effectively
  • Auditors - to understand the nature and role of CSFs and how they need to be audited
  • Ensures each project’s critical success factors are clearly identified and then managed
  • Differentiates between project-managed risks and governance team team managed CSFs - ensuring nothing falls between
  • Ensures the status of CSFs is tracked and reported 
  • Enables appropriate action to be taken when a CSF is not going to be met

Coming soon