The quality of a project's design is a strong indicator of its likelihood of success.

The World Bank's Quality Assurance Group (QAG), DPMG's predecessor, compared two sets of ratings for the same cohort of projects. One set was based on evaluations of the design quality of each project. The other ratings measured whether these projects had achieved their development objectives by the time they closed.

Of the 385 projects evaluated, 74% of projects with satisfactory designs also had satisfactory outcomes years later. By contrast, projects rated less than satisfactory on the basis of their designs were twice as likely as others to fail.

The study also showed that design flaws could be corrected if projects were evaluated early during their implementation. More than half of the projects found to have poor designs were turned around during supervision, and those that were evaluated early performed better than those evaluated later.

Common Design Problems

Four design problems were highly correlated with risk of failure.

Overly complex project designs
Some project objectives are too complex and ambitious for the institution or government to manage. Donors’ (and governments’) enthusiasm tends to expand the scope of a project beyond the capabilities of weaker governments. This complexity takes many forms:

• Multiple sub-sectors, such as the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of education
• Multiple beneficiaries, such as disabled children, street children, migrant children, girls in ethnic minority areas, and illiterate adults
• Multiple reform objectives, such as access, quality, equity, and efficiency.

Complex projects place heavy demands on implementing entities that often have limited capacities. The mismatch between complexity and capacity occurs most frequently in low-income and fragile states.

Poorly formulated causal links between inputs, outputs, and outcomes
Poorly formulated objectives set up targets that are impossible to achieve. For example, the goal of one project was to produce more trained engineers. However, the project focused on construction of new training facilities that would not have produced any graduates by the end of the project.

Poorly selected indicators of success
Poorly selected indicators of success leave all parties to the project flying blind. For example, one project gave four indicators of its objectives. Three of these were outputs (such as the number of vaccination doses procured), not outcomes (such as the number of children vaccinated). In the same project, one outcome measure was inappropriate: it applied to the entire country, not to the sub-regions addressed by the project.

Premature approval
Sometimes projects are approved before they are ready. Examples include infrastructure projects that begin before the bidding documents for the first year of work have been prepared or projects that begin before baseline data for indicators of intended outcomes have been collected.

When projects enter the portfolio too soon, project teams may spend the first year or longer addressing issues that should have been handled before the project started. In these cases, the project is not likely to meet its objectives by the time resources have been spent.