Many researchers have suggested that meeting time, scope, and budget goals, sometimes called ‘project efficiency,’ is not the comprehensive measure of project success. Broader measures of success have been recommended; however, to date, nobody has determined empirically the relationship between efficiency and overall success or indeed shown whether efficiency is important at all to overall project success. Our aim in this article is to correct that omission. Through a survey of 1,386 projects we have shown that project efficiency correlates moderately strongly to overall project success (correlation of 0.6 and R2 of 0.36). Efficiency is shown through analysis to be neither the only aspect of project success nor an aspect of project success that can be ignored.
Three project management approaches—traditional, agile, and hybrid—were considered in this study. Results from an international study, including 477 cross-industry projects, indicated that 52% of projects could be categorized as hybrid approaches. A regression analysis using multiple outcome measures indicated substantial explanatory power (0.21 < R 2 <0.41). Analysis suggested that hybrid and agile approaches significantly increase stakeholder success over traditional approaches while achieving the same budget, time, scope, and quality outcomes. Hybrid approaches were found to be similar in effectiveness to fully agile approaches. Results validate decisions by practitioners to combine agile and traditional practices and suggest that hybrid is a leading project management approach.
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