Behind every successful project is a forward thinking project manager and their team. Project managers and their teams pour their blood, sweat, and tears into their projects. As a recognition of the hard work that team members put in and the sacrifices they make to steer the project in the right direction, businesses must design and implement a bonus plan for the project manager and their team.

The question to ask here is what are the criteria to define simple project success? And what are the things to be kept in mind when developing a bonus plan? In this post, we attempt to answer these questions.

Different criteria to define success bonus

1.Budget management

Getting the job right the very first time is important to keep a tab on project costs. An important KRA for any project manager is budget management. Budget management based incentive plans focus on offering a share of the project savings due to improved performance to the project manager and their team as a bonus.

2.Quality

Quality based bonus plans are popular in the manufacturing industry due to their simplicity. Quality based bonus plans make it simple to assess and measure quality by identifying the number of defects found on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Lately, many companies in the service industry have started emulating this model.

3.Customer satisfaction

Given the fact that customers are one of the most important stakeholders in any business, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many companies use customer satisfaction based project bonus plans. More companies than ever before are basing their bonus plans on the level of customer satisfaction achieved revealed by feedback and final project reports.

4. Resource management/allocation

The project manager and their team’s capability to design and implement an effective resource allocation plan determines project success. Project managers need to determine the most skilled people on their team to perform a particular job. At the end of every project, the project manager’s performance in this regard must be measured to determine their overall success.

Things to be kept in mind when developing a bonus plan

  • Bonuses should be paid only after the success threshold has been achieved.
  • There should be no confusion regarding the rating process. The project manager and their team members must have access to instruments for calculating their bonus.
  • A team member must be assessed only on the basis of factors that are under their control.