The Project of Success: Restoring Project Success as Phenomenon

The ‘projectification’ of the firm and society (Midler 1995; Lundin and Söderholm 1998) implies a systematic translation of organizational goals into performance targets. Such targets offer not only direction for collective action, but also a solid foundation for the assessment of the achievements. To the extent that project success becomes a matter of meeting the explicit targets, it loses its relevance as independent phenomenon. For that reason, perhaps, project success is hardly ever discussed in the project management literature.
However, empirical studies demonstrate that project success is a much more complicated matter than meeting targets. While success may ultimately be justified in terms of a correspondence between aims and achievements, the understanding of both aspects is highly dependent on the project process. An example of a successful project that did not meet the original performance targets will serve to show that success is at matter of perspective as much as it is a matter of achievement.  
Other types of research, e.g. social psychology, have addressed the issue of success more explicitly. I draw on such literature to conceptualize project success anew and to reestablish it as a researchable phenomenon in project management.