There’s no two ways about it: confidence affects success. Success is the accomplishment of an aim or goal, while confidence is the feeling or belief that you can faithfully rely on things or people. Having faith you can achieve something improves the potential for success. As the author J. M. Barrie wrote “The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.”

This maxim applies to team efforts as much as it does individuals, probably even more so. Projects traditionally track trends in costs, schedule, safety, quality, and innovation. These measures provide indispensable hard data for project leaders, and help predict progress toward success. A complimentary measure, often missed in the focus on these essential progress metrics, is success confidence. Inevitably, the level of success confidence will impact team morale, i.e., the enthusiasm and optimism of a group of co-workers with common goals or tasks. 

We created the Success Confidence Index (SCI) to measure this important dimension. What is the broad project team’s expectations of success? We need to ask them to understand. The SCI accomplishes this by surfacing the whole project community’s feelings and beliefs regarding project progress. Moreover, it pin-points the departments and teams where confidence is shifting, allowing for timely interventions.

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The SCI is a simple and efficient leadership tool to track the success expectations of the team. This data, in turn, guides effective decision making and consequent actions in areas needing attention.

The SCI surveys every member of the project, thus generating data from a large pool of people with a stake in the project success. This whole of project sampling method is based on the science of decision-making popularised by the 'Wisdom of Crowds’.  Applied to projects, this approach suggests that the predictions and perceptions of the entire project community will be more valid than those of a few (even if they are in leadership positions). After all, it is the broad team doing most of the work. 

In sum, the SCI augments standard metrics by providing insight into the whole project community’s perceptions of success.

Key features of the SCI include:

Based on our extensive project research, and our collaboration with project leaders, we identified 9 factors to measure success confidence. The inclusion of project culture, owner’s satisfaction, retention and development add additional measures to traditional reporting.