Is it Time to Kill Your Project?

Significant projects, new product development exercises, or changes in direction can suffer from business distractions or lack of vision and go astray. Business changes, skill mismatches, loss of key staff, inappropriate planning, or ineffective project sponsorship are a few of the issues that can spoil well-conceived plans and create issues with projects.

One of the most significant and gut-wrenching but important acts of sound project management is to recommend the cancellation of a project when the initiative is no longer productive. However, the key is to not have a “hair trigger” and kill business initiatives as soon as things go bad. Good project leaders decisively cancel initiatives, but not without diligently performing the following analyses:

?Disregard the sunk costs (money already spent on an initiative) and instead focus on the return on investment of the next dollar that will be spent.

What has been spent already probably cannot be clawed back. Focus should be placed on accomplishments thus far, and the issues and risks to overcome to ensure any additional money spent will yield results. If a plan to address issues is available, proceed to item 2 in this list. If not, good leadership values protecting the upcoming dollars to be spent, rather than pushing on because “some outcome” is desired from the money spent thus far.

Determine whether the original intent of the initiative is still valid.

Often, initiatives take a circuitous path: scope changes or expands, and the original intent of your organization’s effort is lost. Is the current work geared toward a different, unclear, and not universally understood set of objectives? Scrutinize initiatives showing this symptom; it’s a warning sign of potential project failure.

Determine whether the customer is engaged and dedicating resources (in numbers or key skills) to drive this initiative to completion. If not, spending more money and time on the initiative will not yield positive results.

Courageously cancelling initiatives can be a proactive alternative to complete failure. The best leaders cancel initiatives after carefully combing through all the work done for items that might be redeployed elsewhere or serve as valuable lessons learned for future projects.

Better yet, you can work to avoid needing to ask the “Do I kill a project?” question in the first place by reducing risk. For tips on reducing risk, check out my newest course on LinkedIn Learning, Project Management Foundations: Risk which can be found at:

https://www.dhirubhai.net/learning/project-management-foundations-risk-14910484/project-risk-a-battle-of-resiliency?resume=false&u=2125562

Additional thoughts can be found in my project management and outsourcing classes on LinkedIn Learning, including:

·??????Project Management: Technical Projects which can be found at: https://www.dhirubhai.net/learning/project-management-technical-projects-2021/what-is-a-technical-project?autoAdvance=true&autoSkip=false&autoplay=true&resume=false&u=2125562

·??????Outsourcing Fundamentals, the first of six courses on outsourcing, can be found at: https://www.dhirubhai.net/learning/outsourcing-fundamentals/key-components-of-outsourcing?autoAdvance=true&autoSkip=false&autoplay=true&resume=false&u=0

This series of courses focuses on defining services, performing service level management and helping determine what is required to support a business in an outsourcing or service provider scenario.

This article is part of Bob’s Reflections newsletter series , which discusses project management, outsourcing and “intelligent disobedience”, a leadership approach. If you want more of this content, you can?subscribe to receive notifications when a new article posts.

Want to learn more about the topics I talk about in these newsletters? Watch my courses in the LinkedIn Learning Library or check out https://intelligentdisobedience.com/ ‘