Critical success factor (CSF) is the term for an element that is necessary for an organization or project to achieve its mission. It is a critical factor or activity required for ensuring the success of a company or an organization. The term was initially used in the world of data analysis, and business analysis. For example, a CSF for a successful Information Technology (IT) project is user involvement.
"Critical success factors are those few things that must go well to ensure success for a manager or an organization, and, therefore, they represent those managerial or enterprise area, that must be given special and continual attention to bring about high performance. CSFs include issues vital to an organization's current operating activities and to its future success."
Critical success factors should not be confused with success criteria; those are outcomes of a project or achievements of an organization that are needed to consider the project a success or to esteem the organization successful. Success criteria are defined with the objectives and may be quantified by KPIs.
Read more about Critical Success Factor: Concept History, Relation To Key Performance Indicator
Famous quotes containing the words critical, success and/or factor:
“The disaster ... is not the money, although the money will be missed. The disaster is the disrespect—this belief that the arts are dispensable, that they’re not critical to a culture’s existence.”
—Twyla Tharp (b. 1941)
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)
“Children of the middle years do not do their learning unaffected by attendant feelings of interest, boredom, success, failure, chagrin, joy, humiliation, pleasure, distress and delight. They are whole children responding in a total way, and what they feel is a constant factor that can be constructive or destructive in any learning situation.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)