Success and Failure

Is success the opposite of failure?  I wonder if there's a middle between the two: a non-success, non-failure middle. Consider if you focused your efforts on making sure your projects succeed versus making sure your projects do not fail.  Will you be doing the same things? 

Something more concrete: what is the most important thing you can do on your current project to ensure it succeeds?  What is the most important thing you can do on your current project to ensure it doesn't fail?  Are they the same?

Hierarchy of Objectives

Project success is defined in terms of meeting project objectives.  One example of an objective is meeting the project schedule.  If the project meets that schedule, then the project is a success.  What makes things tricky is that projects have more than one objective.  The project is required to meet this schedule, but within this budget, and without having any scope left behind. 

Besides the traditional constraint triangle, there are other objectives: ensuring the project team is happy, ensuring the the project stakeholders are happy, etc. 

Not all of these objectives are equally important. Some are more important than others.  That is why team members are asked to work on weekends rather than letting the schedule slip.  That is why team members are often asked to work without extra pay -- to ensure the project budget is not exceeded.

In a project, it would be helpful to prepare a list of objectives and rank them in order of decreasing importance. That way, all objectives are kept in mind, yet at the same time clear which objective is more important. 

The list might best be kept private.