“This paper provides some thoughts about success criteria for IS–IT project management. Cost, time and quality (The Iron Triangle), over the last 50 years have become inextricably linked with measuring the success of project management. This is perhaps not surprising, since over the same period those criteria are usually included in the description of project management. Time and costs are at best, only guesses, calculated at a time when least is known about the project. Quality is a phenomenon, it is an emergent property of peoples different attitudes and beliefs, which often change over the development life-cycle of a project. Why has project management been so reluctant to adopt other criteria in addition to the Iron Triangle, such as stakeholder benefits against which projects can be assessed? This paper proposes a new framework to consider success criteria, The Square Route.
… Taking the points mentioned by those writers it seems possible to place them into three new categories. These are the technical strength of the resultant system, the bene®ts to the resultant organisation (direct benefits) and the benefits to a wider stakeholder community (indirect benefits). These three categories could be represented as The Square Route to understanding project management success criteria.
… The focus of this paper is project management success criteria. To shift the focus of measurement for project management from the exclusive process driven criteria, The Iron Triangle, Figure 1 to The Square Route, Figure 3. It is further suggested that shift could be significantly helped if a definition for project management was produced which did not include limited success criteria.”