Why Success Criteria Matters

Contents

• Define Success

• Prioritise, and keep prioritising

• Maintain a sense of Urgency

• Use the Tools Efficiently

• Useful Stuff

Define Success

Determine the criteria for success early, that way you know if you’re going off track. It also helps simplify decision making and prioritisation.

Criteria for the successful project and product should be agreed at the level of the accountable owner of the work, i.e. whoever is funding the work. You can have a successful product but unsuccessful project, and the converse is also true.

• Define specific success criteria: Work with stakeholders to identify clear, measurable criteria for the final deliverable (product success) but also for how the project is executed (project success). These should include budget, scope, and schedule but can also go further and include strategic outcomes and value creation.

• Use the SMART framework: Ensure success criteria are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This helps create clarity and allows for objective evaluation.

• Prioritise criteria: If there are multiple success criteria, work with stakeholders to prioritise them. This helps guide decision-making when trade-offs are necessary.

• Don’t lose sight of the most senior person, ie the individual accountable to their organisation for it’s success or failure. They may have a unique view of what success truly means.

• Keep going back to stated success criteria periodically, to check expectations remain connected and the progress towards them is jointly understood. This extends to keeping the team and stakeholders aligned.

• Communicate clearly: Articulate the success criteria back to all relevant people to confirm understanding and agreement. Use clear, unambiguous language.

Success criteria may evolve as the work progresses, so maintain open communication channels throughout each cycle.

Documenting and communicating changes is key to removing tension and ensuring teams continue to work on the most relevant priorities. If there is a change to scope, ensure everyone is aware of the changes the impact caused by them.

 💡 Tip: The time taken to continually assess changes to scope is rarely accounted for. Make it clear that this is real time that can be taken from creating the product, so the more changes are requested for review, especially outside of agreed periods such as sprint planning, the less efficient the team will become.

Keep Prioritising

There are many methods of prioritising what to build, each are useful for different scenarios. Here are some examples. The point isn’t to focus on a specific one that works for your situation to streamline scope in a given cycle (e.g. sprint) to what can give the most relevant contribution towards the overall success criteria.

MoSCoW Method

Categorise features into:

• Must-haves: Essential features

• Should-haves: Important but not critical

• Could-haves: Desirable but can be omitted if needed

• Won't-haves: Explicitly excluded from current timeline

This helps focus on delivering the most crucial elements first.

Kano Model:

Classify features based on their impact on customer satisfaction:

• Basic features (must-haves)

• Performance features (more is better)

• Excitement features (create unexpected delight)

This allows prioritisation based on customer value.

RICE Scoring:

Evaluate features based on:

• Reach: How many users will it impact?

• Impact: How much will it affect those users?

• Confidence: How certain are we about the estimates?

• Effort: How much time/resources will it take?

This provides a quantitative approach to prioritisation.

Stack Ranking:

• Create a simple ordered list of features from highest to lowest priority. This forces tough decisions on relative importance.

User Story Mapping:

• Organise features into a visual map based on user workflows. This helps identify core functionality vs. nice-to-haves.

Key principles to keep in mind:

• Focus on delivering value early and often

• Use data and user research to inform decisions

• Consider both short-term gains and long-term strategy

• Involve key stakeholders in the prioritisation process

• Be prepared to make tough trade-off decisions

• Communicate priorities clearly to the entire team

• Regularly reassess priorities as business needs, markets, and requirements change.

Maintain a Sense of Urgency

Knowing that there is limited time to get useful features shipped helps focus attention to prioritisation, but it needs to be maintained, which is why a steady cadence with focussed targets helps to maintain the sense of focussing time on useful work.

My idea of urgency doesn’t have to involve working extensive hours consistently, but instead focus on using the time you have on the right work, eliminating distractions such as unnecessary meetings and high effort/low value scope.

Here are some actions you can take to establish and maintain a sense of urgency in your initiative:

1. Set clear, short-term goals:
   Break down the project into smaller, achievable goals for each phase or sprint. This helps the team focus on immediate priorities and creates a constant sense of forward momentum.

2. Use visual management tools:
   Implement Kanban boards or burndown charts to visually represent progress and remaining work if your work supports this style. This keeps the team aware of deadlines and outstanding tasks.

3. Conduct daily stand-up meetings:
   These brief, focused meetings help the team stay aligned on priorities and identify any blockers quickly.

   CAUTION: There is a real temptation to fall into a routine and treat controls like daily meetings as an informal catch up with no accountability or agenda, which removes their value, so it’s wise to keep them engaging, focussed and be very strict with timing.

4. Emphasise time-boxing:
   If working in sprints or fixed deadlines, strictly adhere to sprint timeframes and meeting durations. This reinforces the importance of time management and creates a natural sense of urgency.

5. Involve stakeholders frequently:
   Regular stakeholder demos and feedback sessions can create external pressure and reinforce the importance of delivering value quickly, whilst managing user expectations.

6. Highlight the project's impact:
   Regularly remind the team of the project or initiative’s significance and how their work contributes to broader goals and success criteria.

7. Use sprint reviews effectively:
   Use these sessions to demonstrate progress to stakeholders and gather feedback a the correct levels, creating a recurring deadline for the team to work towards.

8. Implement a "Definition of Done":
   Clearly define what completed work looks like, to prevent tasks from dragging on for too long.

9. Address problems quickly:
   Promptly tackle any issues that are slowing down the team to keep momentum.

10. Encourage continuous improvement:
    Use retrospectives to identify areas for improvement and implement changes quickly. It’s easy to conduct a retro and move on to the next phase or sprint. It’s much harder to apply a lesson from a retro to the next sprint. Doing this will help make each sprint or phase more efficient than its predecessor.

While maintaining urgency is important, it's crucial to balance this with sustainable pace to prevent burnout.

The goal is to create an environment for purposeful, focused work prioritising only the tasks that help deliver to the agreed criteria.

Use the Tools Efficiently

Using collaboration tools to your advantage helps to stay aligned with the team and ensures the right work is done at the right time. This topic is a whole series to discuss on it’s own, but in the context of prioritisation and tracking, I have some brief thoughts.

Messaging

We may all be familiar with communications platforms like Slack or Teams, however, they can sometimes be a burden rather than a help, if not used correctly.

Leaders should aim to make good use of communications tools to ensure the team remain aligned with changes or latest updates, however, it’s important to also build time for deeper work by blocking time off communications platforms periodically to avoid distractions.

I find that taking a few hours away from messaging significantly improves my productivity and does not reduce my ability to respond to anything urgent.

Metrics

Tracking tools such as Trello and Jira are helpful for recording and tracking delivery of scope, but often their reporting abilities are overlooked.

Make the most of their metrics reporting so that progress can be evidenced by facts such as velocity reports, which make for more meaningful team discussions on progress, and help teams to understand where to apply their focus or make changes sooner.

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