Dead project walking -why you have to kill projects to be successful

Companies can be outstanding at generating new ideas – I mean really world-class and yet they struggle.  The simple reason is they don’t have the resources to exploit them.  I’m not talking about the resources not existing in the company, I am talking about them just not being available.

If the resources are being used for something useful then is that okay?  Well only if it is more valuable to the business than the project it is delaying.  If not, then your resource prioritisation across the portfolio of projects better be good.

However, the more frustrating problem for companies relates to when their resources are ‘lost’ to the business either still working on bad projects or doing ‘after sales’ on previous projects. 

The pre-requisite for these problems is that the business does not understand what people are doing.  I know that seems ridiculous but I’ve seen it enough to realise that resource management can be truly appalling without visibly crippling an organisation – it just runs as if through treacle and delivers far less than it could.

The second factor is that there is no mechanism to actually ‘kill’ projects.  Surprised?  Again, there are companies that start projects and assume that if something was started it must be a good idea and therefore should be completed.  Think about it, the company starts several projects in a similar area but success of the first project to complete renders the other projects superfluous:

• as the problem has been resolved
• the technical performance target has been achieved
• the solution created by the successful project is not compatible with the other projects

Now what I’m saying is that if you don’t actually have an ongoing review process that can kill or put projects on hold, then you will struggle to start new projects.

The review process should therefore kill or hold projects if:

• the project cannot meet a milestone (a milestone being a project specific state of achievement)
• the project fails a gate review (a pre-defined step in the process that new ideas/concepts etc. have to pass through)

and the important addition is…

• the project no longer makes sense with respect to other projects that have completed or are in progress and other projects that are awaiting approval