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Nowadays, the building of most infrastructures and the deployment of most processes take the form of a project. After the design phase, the main issue is to decide whether the project can be launched or not. During this phase, the decision is either to launch the project in its actual configuration, abandon it or redefine it. According to (STANDISH GROUP, 2013)) 90% of all major projects (of more than 1 million euro) fail due to bad decision-making. Making the good decision is thus the key element for the project’s success (Balachandra, 1984), (Baccarini, 1999), (Asrilhant et al., 2004). To make these decisions, stakeholders need a decision process, with metrics that indicate the likelihood of the project’s success (Shenhar et al., 2001). Thus, a project is likely to succeed if its assessed metrics are pertinent to the context and if they suit the project objectives.
The aim of this paper is to help stakeholders at the project launch phase, by proposing an approach based on a decision process and metrics on which they can rely. So that, they can decide whether the project is qualified to be launched or not. There are few studies in the literature addressing this particular issue – which is also called the “go/ no go” question (Balachandra, 1984), (Han Seung H. & Diekmann James E., 2001), (Tang, 2019), (Vergara-Martínez et al., 2020). Most authors are more interested in the bid/no bid question (Gallagher et al., 1995), (Eldukair, 1990). (Balachandra, 1984) is interested in the decision to continue instead of that to launch. There is, however, a real need to consider this problem of go/ no go for the project launch. This decision is very often based on limited criteria – mainly the cost and the duration (Rose, 2005), (Collins & Baccarini, 2004), (Hughes et al., 2004), (Belout & Gauvreau, 2004). This method can no longer be recommended, because customers are becoming increasingly demanding. Otherwise, cost and duration alone are insufficient as criteria to characterize the project success likelihood. Other criteria that consider dimensions such as technical, environmental, social, and regulatory requirements must be integrated in the assessment. Generally speaking, ignoring these dimensions widens the gap between what was planned and what was achieved and leads to the project failure. Another reason for project failure is the occurrence of non-identified and unpredicted events (risks). Thus, to make correct decisions in the launch phase, there are two main difficulties: (a) the need to integrate several criteria (Costantino et al., 2015) and (b) the consideration of risk (Dutra et al., n.d.), (Wei et al., 2016). This position is also that of (Balachandra, 1984) that states that risk and uncertainty make decision making extremely complex. Authors such as (Zhang, 2016), (Cserháti & Szabó, 2014) and (Yim et al., 2015) have addressed some aspect of these problems, but not all of them. For instance, (Zhang, 2016) focused only on risk while (Cserháti & Szabó, 2014) focused on criteria and (Yim et al., 2015) analysed only the project indicators. (Mirza et al., 2013) and (P. Zhang et al., 2016) proposed a decision framework without investigating risks. (Tang, 2019) proposes a Bayesian Probability to assess the Probability of Success for Go/No-Go Decision Making. (Isihara et al., 2020) a methodology to rank of all possible Alternatives by using the PAPRIKA method.