# Success criteria Success criteria are the conditions that tell you whether a project achieved what it was meant to achieve. Write them before the work starts, as observable or measurable statements: "50 paying customers by March" or "the migration finishes with no data loss", not "launch a great product". They answer a different question from the [[Iron Triangle]]. Time, cost and scope tell you whether the project was delivered as planned; success criteria tell you whether it was worth doing. Without them, a project has no finish line other than running out of energy, and [[Scope creep]] has nothing to be measured against. They usually live in the project's framing document, such as a [[Project charter]]. Two related concepts work at a smaller scale: - **Acceptance criteria** are the conditions a single deliverable (in agile teams, a user story or backlog item) must meet to be accepted. They're specific to that item, and Scrum doesn't require them - **The [[Definition of Done (DoD)]]** is a quality bar shared by all items. The Scrum Guide describes it as a formal description of the state of the Increment when it meets the quality measures required for the product. Teams often add "acceptance criteria are met" as one line of their DoD Success criteria sit above both: every item can be accepted and done while the project as a whole still misses its goal. ## References - https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/definition-done-vs-acceptance-criteria-explained - https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html - https://concepts.dsebastien.net/concept/acceptance-criteria/ - https://concepts.dsebastien.net/concept/definition-of-done/ - Roger Atkinson, "Project management: cost, time and quality, two best guesses and a phenomenon", International Journal of Project Management, 1999: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0263-7863(98)00069-6 ## Related - [[Project charter]] - [[Definition of Done (DoD)]] - [[Iron Triangle]] - [[Scope creep]] - [[3 C's of User Stories]] - [[Scrum]] - [[Minimum Viable Product (MVP)]] - [[Project Management (MoC)]]