Abstract:

Project success is defined in various ways in the literature, but its basic meaning is keeping to the project planned deadline, budget and scope. The goal of the paper is thus to determine factors which influence positively or negatively the difference between the actual and planned project duration, cost and scope in R&D projects.

A review of the existing literature on the factors which potentially may influence keeping to time and budget in R&D projects will be presented. Then the results of a study will be discussed.

The study was carried out by means of questionnaires on the sample of 108 members of various R&D project teams in Poland. The projects were implemented in tertiary education/research institutions and in pure research units.
The areas of potential factors influencing R&D project success, understood as specified above, were divided into areas (project initialisation, project planning, project realisation, project manager, project team etc.). The research showed that the area whose factors had the highest influence on R&D project success is “projects team”.

The respondents could define their projects teams by means of the following characteristics::
- the team consists of experts appreciating work autonomy,
- the team consists of individualists forcing their ideas in the project,
- the team consists of game players,
- the team consists of people who eagerly share their knowledge with the team,
- the team consists of people competing with each other,
- the team is disciplined and requires little control,
- the team is not disciplined and requires a lot of control,
- the team is oriented towards the achievement of a project goal,
- the team often drifts, i.e. it tends to change the direction of research versus areas more interesting for them, which are not necessarily compliant with the scope of the project the team is implementing.

It was studied which of the above features had a significant influence on the difference between the actual and planned project duration, cost and scope in R&D projects. The ANOVA method was used. One of the most interesting results is that the planned time is kept the best in case of project teams consisting of experts appreciating work autonomy and in case of project teams who are disciplined and require little control.

Keywords:

R&D project, project success.