Beyond the Iron Triangle: Modern Day Project Success Factors

Hey there, Bill Dow and I am really excited about sharing my thoughts and experiences on this one. When I started managing project in the early 90s, PMI’s PMBOK was still a thing and the iron triangle was something we lived by on our projects. Every kickoff meeting deck would have the triangle, with Scope, Schedule, and Budget. At the project kickoff meeting, we would tell our executives and our customers to pick two as the project’s primary drivers. The third item could not be a priority for the project team. We could track it, of course, but not to make project trade-offs, which is the entire purpose of the iron triangle! Remember, you can’t have your cake and eat it too! Kidding of course.

No, but seriously, that’s it. For years and years, we used that same slide, that same talk track, and that same iron triangle. Our managers and customers expected us to manage projects that way. Well, that was the 90s and one or two things have changed since then in the world of project management.

Like I said for decades, project managers and PMO leaders have measured project success using PMI’s classic Iron Triangle—Scope, Time, and Cost. This simple but powerful model defined whether a project was successful. If you delivered on time, within budget, and met the defined scope, you were golden. It was a great model and still is today, but back then, project management was still catching on and formalizing. Even using the iron triangle on projects was moving the maturity bar forward. Many projects never even used that!

You might recall, and if you have not seen this, then my “The Balanced PMO” eBook covers all of this material and more. Definitely grab your copy of that eBook today!

We must start thinking about how we manage projects today. We can’t move away completely, but need to expand our thinking beyond the iron triangle.

No, today’s executive teams and stakeholders expect a more nuanced and strategic approach to measuring success. No longer is it enough to check the box on the traditional three constraints, businesses and executives are much more complicated, the pace is much faster and therefore, calling something a success is much harder.

Instead, what we are seeing is a shift in the industry. Organizations need to start to include a broader set of project success factors that reflect the real impact the results of the project will have on its customers. It could be a new application, new interface, or a new dashboard or report, but whatever it is, we need to understand the value it is bringing to our customers. This shift is critical because projects are no longer just about delivery; they’re about business outcomes, customer satisfaction, and long-term sustainability. We hear that more and more across the industry. Right now, PMI has a huge push on this, so timing is right for us to look past and beyond the iron triangle.

Do you agree? Let’s keep going.

So, what are these modern success factors, anyway? Let’s dive in.

Wait, wait, wait… We can’t dive in yet. Success factors vary for individuals and teams. My success factors may differ from yours and those of your executive team. Let’s spend a bit of time on this concept of project success factors.

Before we dive in, we need to think holistically about how can you tell the success of a project, and from my experience I believe that there are two key factors.

1. Task Management – So how well is the team executing the tasks and deliverables of the project and…
2. Customer/Executive/Team Pulse of the project – so how do the team and the customers feel the project is moving along?

I believe we can use those two factors to determine project success, examining them at the beginning, throughout, and at the end of the project. Does that make sense? The thing is, there are very few products on the market today that will look at both factors and give you the pulse of the project. I will discuss more about that later.

Let’s dive into these a bit more, looking at these two main categories.

The New Project Success Factors

Task Management Software (Asana, Monday.com, MS Project, Smartsheet)

1. Hybrid Project Schedule Health

When we think about running hybrid projects, most project teams in IT are using a schedule or task management software. The list of software companies in this space is too large to list for this article, but you know what I mean when I say MS Project, or Monday.com, or Jira or Asana right? Generally, the tool to track and record project tasks, timelines, and resource assignments.

Project Managers build out their schedules, add resources, and durations to manage and control their projects. I wrote an article on WBS – Work Breakdown structures, which I thought I would share while we were on the topic.

Key Considerations:

• How well are the team members hitting their key milestones?
• How many late tasks?
• How many tasks with no resources?

Ok, what if you are not running a hybrid project? How about Agile?

2. Sprint Progress

It’s not just about the health of individual sprints—it’s also about how well progress is being sustained across the project. A project might start strong, but if momentum declines, it signals risk. We use tools such as an Agile Burn Down chart or an Agile Burn Up report as indicators to gauge project progress. I have a ton of those tools listed in my Project Management Communication Tools book sold on Amazon.

Key considerations:

• Is work progressing steadily from sprint to sprint?
• Are teams burning out or struggling with scope creep?
• Are dependencies being managed effectively?
• Are the dashboards and reports showing enough of the information to determine sprint progress or do they need modifying?

3. Sprint Health

For organizations running Agile, the health of your sprints is a major indicator of project success. Strong sprint health shows that teams are progressing efficiently, managing their workload effectively, and avoiding the common pitfalls of scope creep and burnout. I have run a lot of projects in my time, and I know that sprint health is a key indicator of the project’s success, especially after the team has worked 2-3 sprints together and they are still forming as a team.

Key considerations:

• Are teams completing planned user stories at each sprint?
• Are there excessive rollovers of unfinished work?
• Is team velocity stable and predictable?

What is interesting about this whole concept here is that the different project methodologies could have its own project success factors and every organization must set them for their types of projects.

So in IT or on development based products running either a Hybrid Project, Predictive, or an Agile project, understanding how well the tasks are being performed is an excellent factor in understanding how well the project is progressing.

You have to utilize the software tools you have for schedule management and get a series of dashboards and reports setup so you are seeing how well your project is executing towards the schedule completion dates. If the project is off track, then you will need some course correct to occur, and most of the major brands out there have key dashboards and reports built into them for this visibility.

You have other solutions like PowerBI or Tableau that you can pull this pure task management data as well for those dashboard needs. Make sense?

However, task management is great, and I love a good project schedule. It is not the only factor. That second factor is called Project Success factors or Project Factors. What is that? Good question, let’s keep going.

Project Success Factors

As noted above, back in the day, the Iron Triangle was the only indicator of true project success for many years. You hit the on-time metric, or the on-budget goal and you drove a successful project? That is exactly how management deemed it. Trust me, I was a project manager back in the day, and that is how we were rated. But let’s think about that for a second on how that would work nowadays. Really? Do you really think that just because you came in on-time that the project was a success? Or what if you saved $1M, and that is no chump change any day of the week! I don’t think so. That means we need to understand and have a whole new set of project factors beyond the iron triangle to determine at the beginning of the project how we will deem its success. Then the project manager and team members will take it upon themselves to test and check those project factors that have been determined to rate the success of the project throughout its lifecycle.

So, the question is, how do we start this process? Well, that’s a good one, because this is not a simple task, and this will differ from company to company, executive to executive.

Let’s dive in.

Executive Team Discussion

So, most executive teams will have their opinions of what success on a project looks like. Some are very familiar with project execution, some not so much. For today’s discussion, let’s assume they are, and they know how to define the success of a project.

So, how do you approach them? It is simple; you ask them. You gather the executive team together and you gather their feedback on what are the company’s project success factors. Now, this is tricky because what you are doing here is you are asking them to tell you how you want them to rate how they deem projects successful. They have been trained for years around the iron triangle, so you can expect those iron triangle factors from them to start, but you have to push through this conversation and talk to them about the other factors as well. Help them look past just scope, schedule and budget.

Let’s look at some examples beside the Iron triangle that your executives may want to use for judging the success of a project. Be clear, the iron triangle is not going anywhere, but what else should they use? Let’s dive in.

1. Operational Readiness

Delivering a project is one thing—making sure the organization is ready to adopt it is another. A project can hit its deadlines, stay within budget, and fulfill scope requirements, but if the organization isn’t ready to implement and sustain the new solution, is it really a success? This is so important, I often talk about going back 30 years in my career and saying if I could have learned Organizational Change Management back then, I would have for sure. I realize how important it is to the successful rollout of a project, today, yesterday, and into the future. For the last several years across two companies, I have been heavily using Prosci’s ADKAR model.

Operational readiness means the business, IT, and support teams have the tools, training, and processes in place to integrate the project outcome into daily operations. If users don’t adopt the new system, or if business units struggle to transition, then the project’s success is questionable.

Key considerations:

• Are end users trained and comfortable with the new solution?
• Have support teams been adequately prepared?
• Are there transition plans to ensure a smooth handover?

I love this Operational Readiness and think that more and more project managers should really embrace this in their project delivery.

But what else? What else could your executives, your team members, your customers could all use to measure the success of a project. Here is a great list to start:

• Stakeholder Satisfaction  – Measuring how well the project meets the needs and expectations of stakeholders. 
• Business Value Realization  – Evaluating whether the project delivers the intended business benefits. 
• Customer Experience Impact  – Assessing how the project enhances the end-user experience. 
• Scope Adherence  – Tracking whether the project stays within its defined scope without excessive scope creep. 
• Budget Compliance  – Ensuring the project remains within financial constraints. 
• Change Management Effectiveness  – Evaluating how well changes were handled and integrated. 
• Resource Utilization  – Checking if team members, technology, and other resources were efficiently used. 
• Risk Management Success  – Reviewing how well risks were identified, mitigated, and managed. 
• Innovation and Continuous Improvement  – Measuring whether the project introduced new ideas, processes, or efficiencies. 
• Regulatory and Compliance Adherence  – Ensuring the project aligns with industry regulations and company policies. 
• Team Morale and Engagement  – Assessing how motivated and engaged the team was throughout the project. 
• Lessons Learned & Knowledge Retention  – Determining if valuable insights were captured for future projects. 
• Time-to-Market  – Evaluating how quickly the project delivered results compared to expectations. 
• Competitive Advantage  – Checking if the project gives the company an edge in the market. 

Now, some of these critical success factors could be measured during the life of the project, some of them have to be measured when the completed the project. But, bottom line, you can see clearly how we are looking outside of the iron triangle and far past those three key factors of scope, schedule, and budget. You can also see the success rate of your projects improving when you are using more and more of these factors. You are just going to naturally improve  project success, when you incorporate more things into how you execute the project. 

It is also something to note that if you are going to use this many other project success factors, your project planning is going to be a bit more difficult and something you are going to need to plan for to ensure success. You can’t tie your project performance up with having so many factors, it is critical to ensure you are focusing on delivering the right thing for your customer. This is a new approach to project management, and something that will have to be carefully planned by the project manager and the executive team.

When bringing in a comprehensive list like this to your executive team to decide on what does the success of a project looks like, it has to be set at the generic level and then refined for specific projects. Some of these noted above will not make sense on some projects, some they will, but that’s the luxury of having an extensive list, is that you can pick what applies to your specific project.

I think this is such an important shift that project teams and the executive team must align on before starting a project. This will be a learning curve for most executive teams, but the minute they understand you are going to drive the project based on their own parameters will be tremendous. Think about that for a second. Ask your executives what constitutes a successful project; then, as a PMO or project leader, managing the project according to that criteria that they have asked you for. Think how happy they will be and imagine the support they will provide you.

That is great, right? Do you see that? It is a big culture shift, but what a critical one to get right. What a great way to move forward the maturity of delivering your projects.

Shifting from Delivery to Impact

The key takeaway from this entire process would be that we are moving away from a pure a delivery-focused mindset to an impact-focused mindset. It’s no longer enough to deliver a project within scope, on time, and on budget. Nope, we are going to be judging the success of our projects based on a real measure of success, which is the value the project brings to the business. That is success criteria that is just not going to cut it anymore, we need to move beyond that. That is more of a traditional project management approach, and times have changed that we are not seeing that work anymore. 

I developed a video based on this concept years ago, and a firm believer about this that you can check out here: 

https://youtu.be/5EdkR23OKbM?si=J_xuAmLhb6c6uxDz

Here is the link to the free eBook again called “The Balanced PMO” that I am sure you are going to love if you believe we should move past only using the iron triangle, and believe that we must use other factors as well to determine a successful project.

So, this is something that I have been super passionate about for years now and now that I know there is software out that can track these is absolutely amazing. More information is coming soon.

Before we get to the software, we need to help project leaders and the PMO get everyone past that whole iron triangle concept. What do PMO leaders do? How do they start? Let’s get into that next.

What Should PMOs Do?

For PMO leaders, this means shifting how we define, track, and report project success.

Here’s what you can do:

1. Align with Executives – Work with leadership to define the specific success factors that matter most to your organization.
2. Incorporate Success Factors into your projects – See, this is key. You need to change the way PMs deliver their projects using these project success factors. This is a new thought process that many project managers will need to learn.
3. Dashboards – Move beyond time, cost, and scope reporting. Include metrics on operational readiness, sprint health, and quality.
4. Proactively Identify Risks – Watch for early warning signs and address issues before they derail the project.
5. Communicate Value, Not Just Delivery – Ensure project reports focus on business outcomes, adoption, and long-term sustainability.

Software to make this happen?

Yes, believe it or not there is software out there on the market that can make this happen and track different components besides the iron triangle. Not only can it do that, it can also take all of your task management software as well and combine it all together to show you exactly how well your project is executing. I am so excited about it, and excited to share it today with you. The software is called TrueProject. You can find it here: https://www.trueprojectinsight.com

For now, I highly recommend you check out the site and learn about this tool. If you want the best chance of success on your projects, I strongly recommend you check this out.

Why am I so excited about this software?

Well, think about this for a second. I was recommending this looking beyond the Iron Triangle concept since 2018, when I presented the Balanced PMO in London, England, at Lindsay Scott’s PMO Conference. Now, I have found software that can make that real.

How great is that? I can use this software to see these critical project success factors (Balanced PMO) to make project trade-off decisions as I execute my projects or how the PMs in my PMO, execute their projects. For years and years, I have never seen a software product can do this to this level, so that’s why it is so cool in my mind and why I am so excited about it.

Summary

The Iron Triangle served us well for decades, but today’s business landscape requires a more sophisticated view of project success, aka The Balanced PMO. By incorporating modern success factors—like operational readiness, quality assurance, and early warning signs—we can ensure that projects don’t just get delivered, but actually create lasting value for the organization.

How does your organization measure project success? Are you still using the traditional Iron Triangle, or have you evolved your approach and started using this Balanced PMO?

What do you think?

Thanks!
Bill Dow, PMP