Management of “soft” success factors in projects

Success of projects depends on a multitude of factors. Whereas, the discipline of project management covers mainly “hard” (quantitative) factors. It is common knowledge that there is also a big portion of intangible “soft” factors which can hardly be captured, modelled and controlled. That represents a gap in project management research as well as in practice. Therefore, a novel conceptual approach for modelling and controlling such factors is presented in this paper. Its general idea is based on the combination and advancement of existing methods from decision theory and systems dynamics. The result of the research is a methodology for the control of intangible project success factors validated in a plant engineering case study. The approach contributes to the toolbox of project management and goes beyond its existing limitations, hereby, reflecting the real world to a bigger extend.