Variations in Critical Success Factors Over the Stages in the Project Life Cycle

TLDR

The study examined how the importance of project critical success factors varies across the four stages of the project life cycle. Data from 408 project managers were analyzed using ridge regression to identify eight key success factors, followed by stepwise regression at each life‑cycle stage. The analysis revealed that the importance of several critical success factors shifts significantly across different project life‑cycle stages.

Abstract

Afield study was conducted to investigate changes in the importance of project critical success factors across four stages in the project life cycle. A total of 408 project managers or project team members cur-rently involved in a project responded to the questionnaire. Ridge regression analysis was performed on the initially derived ten critical success factors, reducing the final number of critical success factors to eight. A stepwise regression was then done on the critical success factors at each of the four stages in the project life cycle. Results indi-cated that the relative importance of several of the criticalfactors change significantly based on life cycle stages.