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1. Introduction
People in organisations work more and more closely in temporary teams to solve incoming tasks (Bakker, 2010; Shenhar and Dvir, 2007). These findings indicate that the execution of projects has an important influence on organisations (Gassmann and Granig, 2013). Hence, project management methods and tools play crucial roles in project administration and management, and the success or failure of a project seems to be closely connected to a suitable application of them. The increased use of project management methods and tools arises from the growing complexity of the tasks companies are confronted with (Grimm, 2009; Schoeneberg, 2014).
Organisations can focus on tasks with the highest impact on their organisational success by pooling employee skills in project teams. Organisations grouping suitable employees in project teams to solve important tasks will have better chances to stay on the market by creating value for their customers than organisations not applying this approach (Scott-Young and Samson, 2008). This indicates that projects are not an end in themselves, they should to be completed successfully to make a valuable contribution to corporate success. This leads to the question: how can the success of a project be assessed? Project managers need target values to control project execution. The criteria to measure project performance must be clear to enable proper project assessment. However, the question: what criteria should be used for project success assessment? arises. It is necessary to prevent people from comparing apples and oranges discussing project success.
Project success is highly topical in project management and has been widely researched. Literature describes different approaches to measure the success of a project. The basis of nearly all approaches is Barnes’ Iron Triangle (Cao and Hoffman, 2011; Chan and Chan, 2004; Chang et al., 2013; Gemünden, 2015; Khan, 2014; McLeod et al., 2012; Serra and Kunc, 2015; Serrador and Turner, 2015). In the 1970s, Barnes found that the connection and collaboration between his production engineers, the engineers, who assigned responsibility for monitoring costs, and management holds potential for substantial improvement. At that time, there were neither project management nor research efforts that consider project management. The aim of the Iron Triangle was to visualise the dependencies between monitoring the independent dimensions time, budget and performance (Delo, 2013; Weaver, 2007)....