Presentation: 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.
PMI Talent Triangle Skill: Strategic and Business Management
Biography: Jason Dunn has spent nearly 30 years in projects across a wide variety of industries, including 18 in Information Technology. He has served in many different roles on projects from Project Manager, Change Manager, Business Analyst, and Tester. He has managed small to medium-sized IT projects (>$30MM), serving as a program and portfolio manager as well. In addition, he has worked with many Fortune 100 companies to assess and improve their project management maturity and processes through project risk assessments and system benchmarkings. As part of this work, he has stood up PMOs as well as assessed and improved existing PMO using a data-driven assessment framework. He has also led many different industry-sponsored studies in areas such as owner/vendor relationships, labor productivity, knowledge management and design reuse. Recently, Jason has developed a training program based on an industry standard maturity framework aimed at assessing, and then improving, companies’ portfolio development and management capabilities.
At present, he is the PM Community Program Director in Freddie Mac’s EPMO, which is committed to improving PM maturity and capabilities through education, networking, facilitation, and knowledge management. He is a PMP, CSM, CSPO, and Certified Change Manager.
