"If It Can't Be Expressed In Figures, It Is Not Science, (Engineering, Finance, or Project Management), it is Opinion" — Robert Heinlein

Concluding a project within the initial estimated budget and time frame does not necessarily guarantee it has been a success.

The success of a project is defined by more than the triple constraint; success encompasses other elements such as client acceptance, the reputation of the company, alignment to the business strategy, ethical behavior, and team cohesiveness.

The business factor, correlated with the value that a project adds to the company, has become a key element for defining a project's success.

This success, with all its multiple facets, should be demonstrated to sponsor, client, management, or other influential stakeholders, in units of measure meaningful to the decision-makers.

When we don't have an Integrated Project Performance Management System and a Technical and Programmatic Architecture, we get a big pile of disconnected features, products, or services...

No matter the project development process - Agile or Traditional - without this project performance management system, assessing physical percent complete and the programmatic architecture governing on the money provided by those paying us is applied to produce value, the probability of success is low at best, since ...

Complex systems usually come to grief, when they do, not because they fail to accomplish their nominal purpose. Complex systems typically fail because of the unintended consequences of their design (and their management) …?

I like to think of system engineering as being fundamentally concerned with minimizing, in a complex artifact, unintended interactions between elements desired to be separate.

Essentially, this addresses Perrow’s ? concerns about tightly coupled systems. System engineering seeks to assure that elements of a complex artifact are coupled only as intended.

– Michael Griffin, NASA Administrator, Boeing Lecture, Purdue University, March 28, 2007.

? Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, Charles Perrow, Princeton University Press, 1999.