An empirical investigation into different stakeholder groups perception of project success Kate Davis Kingston University London, Kh-BS2013, Kingston Hill, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT2 7LB, United Kingdom Received 19 September 2016; received in revised form 8 December 2016; accepted 6 February 2017 Available online 6 March 2017 Abstract Organizations use projects to manage customized, one-off events across a wide range of functions. Project management is an essential operational tool and process that is utilized to effectively and efficiently manage resources, tasks and activities, and associated timelines. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possibility that failure is a result of different interpretations of the criteria and factors used for success by multiple stakeholder groups. Currently, there is no recorded theory to determine project success within the project management literature, which includes both the perspective of multiple stakeholder groups and shared use of success dimensions for a given project. This omission is the basis of the current work, which explores the impact of using all stakeholder views as opposed to a selected few to define project success. The research outcomes are important for informed managerial decision making that enables the minimization of major financial losses. Crown Copyright © 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Project success and strategy; Managing stakeholders; Project success; Perception of project success; Multiple stakeholders 1. Introduction 1.1. Background The Standish Group (2012) survey found that 18% of projects fail and 43% were challenged. In KPMG's (2013, p. 11) survey, they noted that “project activity is on the increase and so are failure rates” with only 33% of respondents agreeing that their project was completed on budget, 29% on time and 35% to scope, this was compared to the 2010 survey whereby 48% were on budget, 36% on time and 59% to scope. Despite these statistics, project activity is increasing across all sectors of the economy. KPMG (2013, p. 17) noted that “54 percent of organizations surveyed completed more than 21 projects. This is a significant change from 2010, where in response to the same question, 98 percent of those surveyed reported completing only five projects or fewer”. Further, project management is criticized for being practitioner oriented and lacking rigor, basis in literature, focusing mainly on technical tools, such as critical path analysis (Turner, 2010). This study is important as it aims to provide a rigorous approach based in literature that will align stakeholder views to reduce project failure rates. Previous work identified a post-positivist structured approach to recognize gaps in research and create interview questions for future empirical work. These papers investigated the stakeholder perception of project success in the literature and how this was measured through current methods and models. It was concluded in the author's previous work that the perceptions of success by stakeholders are significant to the final project judgment and therefore, warranted investigation. The reviewed literature revealed that the most cited instrument used to assess project success is Pinto and Slevin's (1987) quantitative ‘diagnostic behavioral instrument’. Their instrument has been developed over a years by numerous authors (see Jugdev and Müller, 2005, for a review) to identify significant key dimensions for project success. The author's previous work reviewed this and additional methods that have been used to measure project success and identified areas that have previously been excluded for empirical research into multiple stakeholder groups' perception of project success that could be applied to projects. The measurement methods could be traced back to the ‘diagnostic behavioral instrument’ of Pinto and Slevin (1987) to E-mail address: kate.davis@kingston.ac.uk. www.elsevier.com/locate/ijproman http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2017.02.004 0263-7863/00 Crown Copyright © 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect International Journal of Project Management 35 (2017) 604 – 617