How to measure the success of a project

Everybody wants their project business projects to be successful, but it’s not always easy to measure that success. In this guide, we’ll explain some simple ways to measure the success of any business project. 

The measurements we’ll be covering are:

• What did you accomplish?
• What do your customers/clients think?
• How much did it cost?
• Did it increase profits?
• What do your shareholders think?
• What do you and your team think?

It’s important to celebrate the accomplishments of you and your team, but it’s also important to compare those accomplishments to the specific goals you set yourself at the beginning of the project. 

After a project is complete, you and your team should have a meeting and ask yourselves:

• Did you achieve all of your goals?
• Was it done in the most efficient way possible in terms of time, money, and labour?
• Is there anything that you think could have been different?
• Is there anything that proved pointless, and so could be missed next time?

This is where some kind of project management software would prove incredibly useful. Rather than retracing your steps through memory, you could just check the tasks you had set, see the time spent on each task, and see where you were struggling. 

Of course, one of the most straightforward ways of measuring the success of your project is to directly ask your clients what they thought about it. After all, they are the ones who would know better than most how well your service is performing. 

This involves getting feedback from clients. To get the most accurate feedback, you should gather feedback before the project starts and after it has finished. Some common ways of gathering feedback include:

• Phone surveys
• Email surveys
• Feedback forms
• Face-to-face questions

When it comes to customer experience, the same rules apply. But the methods for gathering feedback will be slightly different. You can use a lot of the same methods we mentioned above for clients, but you can also measure customer satisfaction with:

• The number of complaints you receive
• The number of positive emails you receive
• The number of returning customers
• The number of one-off customers
• Online reviews

Again, if you compare figures from before and after a project launch, it should give you a fair measure of how successful that project was. 

Cost shouldn’t be the top priority when measuring success, but it is an essential factor. After all, going too far over budget will negate any financial benefits created by the project. Measuring the actual cost against the budget can be a good indication of how what went to plan, what didn’t,  and how realistic that plan was in the first place. 

Ideally, you should keep track of your spending throughout the project to make sure you don’t go too far over budget, and so you can solve any issues that are causing the excessive spending. 

Accounting software is the perfect tool for keeping track of expenses over time. It’ll track all of your expenses, and give you real-time insights into profit and loss projections, giving you complete control over the budget for your project. 

This one seems fairly obvious, and it only applies to project that are trying to increase profits, but calculating a return on investment (ROI) is a clear way of measuring success. 

It’s a simple case of working out how much money you’ve spent on a project (investment) compared to how much more money you’ve earned because of it (return). 

Remember, it’s the actual profit you need to measure rather than increased income. After all, a huge project to boost sales could bring in loads of money, but if you’ve spent the equivalent on that project then it was essentially pointless. 

Talking to your shareholders or business partners is essential at all the main stages of a major project. You should get their input before, during, and after the project launch to see how they feel about the whole thing. 

This is partially about profits, like we mentioned before, but it’s also about making sure they feel comfortable with any major decisions that are happening in the business.   

You could have the best plan in the world to boost profits, but if you’ve not checked in with your investors throughout the process, you could end up going in a direction that they feel uncomfortable with and lose their investment. 

One of the best ways to measure the success of a project is to ask the people who actually worked on the project. 

As a business owner, you want your employees to feel challenged, invested, and proud of the work they’ve achieved. If they do, they’ll be more likely to stick with your business and recommend you as an employer. 

At the end of a project, ask your employees:

• Was it an enjoyable experience?
• Do they feel like they achieved something they could feel proud of?
• Was there anything they think could have been done better?
• Did they learn any new skills or industry knowledge?
• Do they feel like they’ve progressed personally or professionally?

Financial management can be stressful and time-consuming when you’re self-employed. That’s why thousands of business owners use the Countingup app to make their financial admin easier. 

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation, invoicing on the go, receipt capture tools, tax estimates, and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 

All this makes it the perfect accounting software to stay in control of any business project.

Find out more here.