When You Have to Kill a Project It takes courage to kill a project, but sometime

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When You Have to Kill a Project

It takes courage to kill a project, but sometimes you know it has to be done. Some common symptoms of a failing project are ill-defined initial requirements, constant changes in scope, excessive changes in resources and personnel, and extreme stress/tension over anticipated changes. Yet, a project may have followed the “book” and done everything right, but still need to be terminated. This was the case with a project in the U.K. where the client was highly committed to the project, contributing time, resources, and prompt decisions. The scope was clear, completion criteria agreed upon, the budget and timeframe acceptable to all. Early on, however, an unavoidable scope change had to be made, requiring a 20 percent increase in time and a 10 percent increase in cost, agreed to by the client. As the project approached the end of the fi rst phase, it was clear that the quality and schedule were both deteriorating, as indicated in progress reports to both the client and senior management. A quick review showed that the results were not going to be acceptable. With the agreement of the PM, an outside Expert was called in to review the effort to date and make a recommendation. Then a joint meeting was held with the Expert, the PM, the Program Manager, and the primary contractor where it was decided that the best thing to do was to work together to complete phase one and then terminate the project, with a clean handover to another team to tackle phase two. Although disappointing to everyone, the close and frequent communications of both progress and concerns throughout the project with upper management and the client, offered in timely, digestible amounts, reduced their expectations and protected the client from a surprise at the end. Honest, consistent communication throughout the project life cycle resulted in improved trust, integrity, and confi dence in the vendor and their team.

Question 1. What are your thoughts about doing everything right and the project still failing?

Question 2. Does the admonition “Never surprise the boss!” now make more sense? Why?

Question 3. Do you think the scope change at the beginning was the problem here, or was there going to be a problem anyway?

Explanation / Answer

Answer 1. There are multiple Project Methodologies followed by different companies, but what really drives a successful project completion is the far sightedness of the project manager and his ability to execute the project. As mentioned in the question, there was too much trust and honesty involved, which resulted in the client to take for granted the execution of the project. People's behavior is one of the main factors in the completion of any project. And the manager here simply relied on honest communication than documented facts.

The vendors incur excessive or unnecessary costs if they are not managed properly. The project manager should have foreseen the scope change if any. Not everything can be followed by the book, there is a certain level of smartness and cautiousness needed to execute a project.

There were additional cost increase of 10% and time increase of 20%, This means the project will not only take more time to finish but there are added costs to be incurred to finish that project, which will delay the benefits to be brought in by this project. ultimately giving lower return on investment.

Although everything went by the book, there was a lack of dedication on the part of the project manager, who trusted the vendor too much.

Answer 2: For an effective decision making a manager would need clear and complete information. Surprises give very less time and even lesser information to resolve the issue at the nth hour. It also makes the manager /top management angry leading to spur of the moment decisions. So yes 'Never Surprise the Boss' makes complete sense.

Answer 3: Scope change is one fo the major factor why this project failed. The objectives were poorly cited. The timelines and cost went overhead and too much trust in the vendor lead to quality and schedule issues.

All these costs overrun, unanticipated changes, increase the maintenance cost for the company, making a project like this essentially fruitless and the company ends up bearing the loss.

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