Importance of Defining Project Acceptance Criteria in Your Projects

What are Project Acceptance Criteria?

Project Acceptance criteria are criteria that include performance requirements and essential conditions, which must be met before project deliverables are accepted (PMBOK® Guide). They set out the specific circumstances under which the user will accept the final output of the project. They are criteria that we can measure, achieve, and prove to our clients that our work is complete.

Project Acceptance Criteria Examples

1. Backup and Restore testing has been completed successfully.
2. User acceptance testing (UAT) has been completed, and the Senior User/Project Executive has signed off on user acceptance testing.
3. All requirements have been formally approved.
4. Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is in place to be used in situations where the IT system is unavailable, for whatever reason.

How Do You Document Project Acceptance Criteria?

According to the PMBOK® Guide, 4th edition, the acceptance criteria are documented in the requirements document and the Project scope statement. Acceptance criteria are often also considered an important part of contractual agreements on external projects. 

What Value Does a Clearly Defined Set of Acceptance Criteria Bring to Your Projects?

1. Set the Client's Expectation Level

The success or failure of your projects depends on the team’s to meet the clients’ documented or perceived acceptance criteria. By having a clearly defined set of acceptance criteria, you will be able to set the client’s expectation level and lay the groundwork for their perception of the completed product. Inaccurate or missing acceptance criteria can lead to low customer satisfaction levels, missed delivery dates, and development cost overruns.

For instance, on the project we mentioned earlier, one of the acceptance criteria that we worked on was whether performance testing was conducted to evaluate the SharePoint application to the agreed performance criteria. This would check whether the expected response time was met or not. The response times of the SharePoint application had drastically reduced in the last few years despite a marginal increase in the number of users across the globe. 

Business users also complained of different response times in different parts of the globe, where the client had set up its business operations. Therefore, it was very important for us to include this as one of the acceptance criteria—and set the expectation level of the client regarding the application response times and provide them with a range of values in seconds, such as 1 – 2 seconds to refresh the page and so on.

2. Make the Difference Between Getting Paid or Not on Projects Where the Client Is Paying for Deliverables

Acceptance criteria are typically used for projects where the client is paying for deliverables or the completion of the project’s phases. You should ensure that the acceptance criteria developed are relevant to the deliverables, binary (either acceptable or not acceptable), measurable or tangible (whenever possible), and tied to payments (whenever appropriate). 

Clients are known to refuse to sign off on the deliverables for two legitimate reasons: either the project results have not met their needs, or they themselves were not clear about their needs. By working towards a clearly defined set of acceptance criteria before you start working on your deliverables, you will be protecting yourself, your project team, and your company.

Since the project sponsor is the person responsible for approving the final product, they are also responsible for approving the acceptance criteria. All things being equal, if the acceptance criteria are met, there should be no reason why the sponsor should not approve and accept the final product.

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3. Avoid Miscommunication on Internal Projects

If the client is internal, you will be able to avoid political maneuvering and miscommunication by developing a clearly defined set of acceptance criteria. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to manage an application development project for the testing horizontal within our organization. The web application was built to help the clients and senior management, with a lot of relevant information regarding the business of this particular horizontal. One of the biggest challenges in these projects was managing communications with a geographically dispersed team based out of development centers in different cities.

Most of the Stakeholders on this project (including myself) volunteered for this project in addition to our regular responsibilities. As a result, many stakeholders found it difficult to contribute to the project in parallel with their daily jobs. Therefore, it was difficult to gain a common, clear, and shared understanding among the stakeholders on several issues in the project, including requirements gathering. 

This was one of the reasons why it took us almost a month to gather a clear set of requirements and acceptance criteria, then and get it approved by VP who was also the project sponsor. Another issue was that all the primary stakeholders including business analysts, testing experts, and testing managers, had different perceptions of the end product.

As the application was being developed, I had to set up a lot of knowledge transfer sessions for my team with the business analysts and the testing experts. It was quite difficult for me to gain a consensus on the requirements among these stakeholders. But as a team, we persisted in our efforts to gather a clear set of requirements and the acceptance criteria and were able to get them approved. This helped us a lot in reducing the time required for coding and development, and avoid other conflicts which would have eventually ensued had this not been done.

Conclusion

Acceptance criteria represent a specific and defined list of conditions that need to be met before a project can be considered completed and the project deliverables are accepted by the client.

Having clearly defined acceptance criteria can help the project team in many ways, including:

• Setting client expectations regarding the end product
• Measuring, achieving, and proving to your clients that the work is complete
• Gaining formal signoffs from the client on the deliverables in the project
• Protecting yourself and your company from issues such as non-payments from clients.

Clearly defined acceptance criteria can also help you avoid miscommunication and political maneuverings on internal projects. Now you understand why they are included as a part of the contractual agreement with clients, as well as in the project scope statement and requirement documents.

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