Breaking Bad: Deciding When to Save a Project and When to Shut it Down
Abstract:
Once projects begin to “break bad”, there is often a limited set of actions that Project Leaders can take to improve the project’s final outcomes. Furthermore, late identification of issues will limit your potential recovery actions even more. The data tell us that we keep vampire projects (i.e., those that suck attention, resources, and time away from other projects) alive much longer than we should and that we try to rescue more projects than we need to.
This presentation will review proprietary data from a study executed with over one hundred multinational companies concerning project recovery rates (and the success of recovery efforts). The presentation will provide actions that Project Leaders can take to accomplish the following: 1) identify characteristics that make projects risky, 2) gauge when projects are starting to “go bad”, 3) options to consider once projects “go bad”, and 4) actions based on one of three options that are available to Project Leaders. One of the key factors that drive our companies to keep projects alive are our culture. Also, our metric systems feed this dysfunctional situation by either incentivizing the wrong things or by focusing on lagging indicators that do not help Project Leaders to identify issues early enough. With the guidance provided in this session, project decision makers will have early warning signals, metrics that they can use to predict project issues, and strategies to process the tough decisions on whether to keep a project afloat or pull the plug. Sometimes, killing a project is the very best decision.
