Abstract
Project success has been a matter of great concern irrespective of industry throughout the world. Companies are increasingly investing more on new methodologies and technologies to achieve better success in projects. It also holds true for South Africa, as achieving success is a major area of concern for projects undertaken in most industries in South Africa, especially ICT related projects. One of the major contributing factors of such poor success rate is the lack of consensus on what constitutes the success of a project. Previous studies on this topic agree that project success is viewed differently by different stakeholders, and researchers have also started to accept the need to define project success based on specific context and industry. However, most current published studies on this topic were conducted primarily in the context of USA and Europe. The primary objective of this research is to better understand how project success is viewed in the context of South African mobile network operators. It was also explored if the perception of success criteria varies with different stakeholder type and project type.
To achieve the objectives, quantitative data were gathered from employees from major South African mobile network operators using an online web-based questionnaire. One way ANOVA with Post hoc Scheffe test was used to compare the difference of perception between the groups. It was found that customer satisfaction and scope accomplishment with acceptable quality are the two most important success criteria as perceived by the professionals within RSA mobile network operators. Statistically significant differences were found between different stakeholder groups on their perception of project success criteria; however, no difference was found between different project types. Senior managers and project managers gave more importance to business focused or macro success criteria such as profitability, customer satisfaction whereas technical personnel gave more importance to short term or micro success criteria such as project completion on time and project involving new technology etc. The findings of the research emphasize the need to have a more collaborative and stakeholder-centric approach in defining success measures of a project which would assist in managing expectations of various stakeholders, leading to more successful project delivery.