Somehow earlier this year I subscribed to the chaos report email. Given the significant criticism of chaos report's measure of success - on time, on spec, on budget - I was amused by this week's email which poses the question whether their success criteria are relevant. What the Standish group does have that most of us don't, is access to a large number of (unpublished and hence unverifiable) examples.
From the email: "Which is more important project success or project value? It turns out the project success and project value is orthogonal or at right angles to each other. The harder you strive for perfect success the lower your project value. The harder you strive for greater values the lower the success rate.
We know this because we have coded each of the 50,000 projects within the CHAOS Database a success rate and value rate. Each rate has a score from 0 to 100. By grouping the projects by organization we can come up with a ranking by success and value. We then can compare the rankings. One of the items we discuss is another question Is the traditional triple Constraints (cost, time, and quality) measurement still appropriate?"
I'm surprised by the assertion that success and value are orthogonal. I'd have thought that there was at least some connection between time/cost/functionality and perceived value; if the value of your project is not in the spec, surely you wrote the wrong spec?