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I'm currently developing project management software for my thesis project. What I want to know is:

  • If the project is unsuccessful, what could possibly happen with that particular project? Should it be deleted?

  • If the project meets the deadline and is presented to a client, and the client is not satisfied with the outcome, what should happen to that particular project? Should it be re-opened again?

This questions is specifically about projects created with project management software.

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  • What do you consider as an unsuccessful project?
    – ashga
    Sep 18, 2015 at 10:40
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    This question is fundamentally an opinion poll, and is a common problem when one talks about automation before defining an organization's process first. The problem is that the question isn't outlining a process in context; it's looking for a lowest common denominator for software-based processes, and there isn't one. While it's an interesting question, I'm voting to close.
    – Todd A. Jacobs ♦
    Sep 19, 2015 at 20:37
  • Hello Orcocanon, welcome to Project Management SE. Many of your questions have been closed or put on hold. You can go through the comments on your posts and then edit those posts to fix the problems and possibly get them reopened. On our site, we're looking for questions that make it clear what it is exactly you're looking for. See How to Ask for more details on how you might edit these posts to clarify. Hope this helps.
    – jmort253
    Sep 25, 2015 at 7:28

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If the project was unsuccessful what would possibly happen with that particular project? Should it be deleted?

I would argue against automatic deletion. Maintaining project records for some period of time may be dictated for regulatory reasons (e.g. if you are in pharma or financial industries), corporate record retention policies, and as a general best practice so that you can consult past projects when planning. Give the end user the option for archiving or otherwise saving the project files instead.

If the project meets the deadline and was presented to a client and the client was not satisfied of the outcome. What will happen to that particular project? Should it be re-opened again?

Clearly if your client wasn't happy with your project products then your project wasn't successful.

RANT MODE ON

A pet peeve of mine is the mania for schedule and budget being the primary measures of success for projects. In some instances this is appropriate that they contribute to your definition of success, but I would argue that delivery of business value for money spent is the key metric. This will also allow you to consider things like product quality, effectiveness of project visioning and requirements gathering, impacts on business risks, etc etc etc.

The challenge is that it takes time and effort post-project to assess business value, whereas adherence to schedule and budget are tantalizingly easy to collect, appear to be objective, and coincide with project end... all of which make it easy to figure out who gets what bonus on their next performance review.

RANT MODE OFF

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    +1 on realisation of business benefits being the key metric. Sadly much harder to measure than "are you late" or "has it cost more", which is why those are the easy targets IMO. But business benefit is surely the essence of success for project deliveries...
    – Marv Mills
    Sep 18, 2015 at 13:20

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