A comprehensive answer to the question of which factors are critical to project success depends on answering three separate questions: "What factors lead to project management success?", "What factors lead to a successful project"? and "What factors lead to consistently successful projects". This paper draws on new empirical research from more than 70 largue multi-national or national organizations to aswer each of these three questions, and to identify 12 factors that are, in one way or another, critical to project sucess