C11: Key deliverables / indicators of success

The University has limited resources (including financial and staff resources) with which to undertake projects. As such, a mechanism is required in order to evaluate projects. This process will need to establish two key issues:

• Firstly, a project will need to indicate that on balance the overall impact is beneficial to the college’s / service’s and University’s strategic missions.
• Secondly, as the University does not have sufficient resources to undertake all projects that are beneficial to the University, it will be necessary to rank in order of greatest to least benefit those projects that pass the beneficial test hurdle.

Other areas of these procedures identify the costs and risks of the proposed project. The Project Sponsor and Project Manager need to identify the key deliverables and the key indicators of success. The achievement of these will be assessed after the completion of the project using the post project appraisal or post project evaluation (for larger projects).

All projects have three core key indicators of success:

• Did the project satisfactorily end at the planned project completion date?
• Did the project use less than the originally identified net of implementation costs and incomes?
• Did the project achieve the identified key deliverables at the identified time?

The Request for Authorisation form (RFA) needs all of these to be specified. To enable the Project Accountant to complete a thorough pre-screening of the investment appraisal, all supporting calculations, spreadsheets and assumptions should be submitted with the Project Proposal / Request for Authorisation / Investment Appraisal.

A major project’s achievement of the University’s priority strategic key deliverables will improve the prospects of a project achieving funding from the Infrastructure Fund, although this does not exclude the prospect that other deliverables may also qualify a project for funding. Other key deliverables are (for example):

• Improving staff student ratios.
• Improving environmental sustainability.
• Improving efficiency of business processes.

When assessing the key deliverables of a project it is important to quantify the improvement the project will deliver, and to phase when these improvements will occur. The performance of the project against these will be assessed after the completion of the implementation stage of the project using post project appraisals or post project evaluations (for larger projects).