Traditionally, the success of a project is assessed using internal measures such as technical and operational goals, and meet- ing schedule and budget. More recently, it has been recognized that several other measures should be used to define project success. These measures reflect external effectiveness: the project’s impact on its customers, and on the developing organiz- ation itself. In our study of 110 defense projects performed by Israeli industry, we used a multidimensional approach to measure the success of defense projects. Based on pre- vious studies, we defined four dimensions of success: meeting design goals; benefits to the customer; benefits to the developing organization; and benefits to the defense and national infrastructure. For each pro- ject, we asked three different stakeholders (the customer, the developing organiz- ation, and the coordinating office within the Ministry of Defense) for their views on the relative importance of these dimen- sions of success. Analysis of the data revealed that the dimension benefits to the customer is by far the most important success dimension. The second in import- ance is meeting design goals. The other two dimensions are relatively unimportant. 1. Introduction Project management is one of the main organizational activities performed within industrial organizations. Assessment of a project’s outcome is extremely important to everyone involved in development projects — whether as a mana- ger, a customer, a contractor, or any other stakeholder. However, the assessment of a project’s success may differ depending on the point of view of the person who is asked to provide the assessment. Often, projects con- sidered successful by their developers have been poorly received by the customer, and projects considered internally as failures, have been hailed as successes by the customer. Freeman and Beale (1992) provide an interesting example of disparity in points of view: An architect may consider success in terms of aesthetic appearance, an engineer in terms of technical competence, an accountant in terms of dollars spent under budget, a human resources manager in terms of employee satisfaction and chief executive officers rate their success in the stock market. The multi-attribute nature of project suc- cess forces managers to use several, sometimes many, measures of success. In this study these measures are divided into four natural groups, which we call dimen- sions. The managerial policy required to obtain a high level of project success accord- ing to one success dimension may not be the appropriate one if another success dimension is used for assessing project success (see Tishler et al., 1996). Thus, it is useful to rank success dimensions according to their importance. This paper, which is based on data from a comprehensive study of defense projects performed by Israeli industry, investigates the relative importance of the four dimen- sions of success suggested by Tishler et al. (1996) as a multidimensional framework for CUSTOMER REF.:R&D? Shenhar MCS REF.:RAD H243 R&D Management 27, 2, 1997. © Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 97 The relative importance of project success dimensions Stan Lipovetsky 1 , Asher Tishler 1 , Dov Dvir 1 and Aaron Shenhar 2 1 Faculty of Management, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel 2 Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA