Concepción del éxito en los profesionales del diseño

MSCI203 INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS ANALYSIS

How Do Design Professionals Understand and Measure Success?

Enrique Moreno de la Cova
Euro BBA Student

1. Introduction

Success is a hard concept to measure. It comes from the Latin “succedere” which means to come after, in the sense of “to turn out well” or “have a favourable result”. There are many indicators that appear to measuresuccess, above all in western culture, where success is very often correlated with the amount of money.
There is much disagreement on what factors create project success. In 1997 a paper was published on the different dimensions of projects success (Shenhar et al, 1997). It stated that the topic of project success is one of the most discussed topics and, in spite of that, experts cannot but agree todisagree on which criteria is appropriate to judge success. This is made obvious after a brief study of the literature. “Project effectiveness may be assessed by different interest groups, or stakeholders (Freeman, 1984) – stockholders, managers, customers, employees, and so on – Criteria for measuring project success must therefore reflect different views” (Stuckenbruck, 1986). “For instance, anarchitect may consider success in terms of aesthetic appearance, an engineer in terms of technical competence, an accountant in terms of dollars spent under budget, a human resource manager in terms of employee satisfaction, and chief executive officers rate their success in the stock market” (Freeman and Beale, 1992).
In order to better understand the concept of success, lets define some of theterms that are present in this subject. Firstly, what is Design and what is a Project? These concept has many definitions, most of which lack enough detail. The concept of Design is subject to a great controversy, as it is frequently misunderstood and associated with trend topics due to slang language. It can also be a subjective issue and vary greatly from person to person depending on their job.An entrepreneur may have a different view of what design is from an engineer. There are several definitions of this terms that should be taken into account here.
The Merriam Webster dictionary defines design as “to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan. To device for a specific function or end” and Project as: “a specific plan or design”. Paul Ralph (2010) define design as aas a process, executed by an agent, for the purpose of generating a specification of an object based on: the environment in which the object will exist, the goals ascribed to the object, the desired structural and behavioural properties of the object (requirements), a given set of component types (primitives), and constraints that limit the acceptable solutions.
These are several concepts whichwill be used in this paper and which, in order to better reach its goal, should be explained:

Performance: According to the Business Dictionary, performance is the accomplishment of a given task measured against preset known standards of accuracy, completeness, cost, and speed. In a contract, performance is deemed to be the fulfilment of an obligation, in a manner that releases the performer fromall liabilities under the contract.

Project Management: Again, according to the Business Dictionary, project management is the body of knowledge concerned with principles, techniques, and tools used in planning, control, monitoring, and review of projects.

Project Manager: According to ProjectSmart.co.uk, project manager is the person who has the overall responsibility for the successfulplanning and execution of a project. He or she must have a combination of skills including an ability to ask penetrating questions, detect unstated assumptions and resolve conflicts, as well as more general management skills.
Artist: According to Dictionary.com, an artist is a person who produces works in any of the arts that are subject to aesthetic criteria. A person whose trade or profession...