What does it take to STOP a Project mid-flight?
Intellect, emotional intelligence, and data. Or does it?
Let’s work a little right to left for a moment
It’s rarely an easy decision for the Executive to stop a project, especially one that’s invested millions, or one that’s already been running for perhaps a year or two.
There’s always a well-trodden path in assessing such a decision. Data should be prevalent, e.g. MI, Financials, ROI, Risk, Trend etc. Often, however, it’s rarely just about the data.
Assessing the impact on the organisation is critical
Both near term and strategically. Presenting a message to the business that we ‘cannot deliver’ complex change leaves a negative legacy, so much so, this may lead to the Executive failing to make important strategic decisions next time around, e.g. “we failed once before, we’ll likely fail again”.
No CFO or CEO wants to write off millions. They will feel accountable, in certain situations they may even feel exposed because of the project’s failure. Let’s be honest, whilst there are numerous reasons for complex project failures, announcing a STOP mid-flight on an already expensive project, will likely lead to collateral damage.
Arriving at the decision should initially be un-emotive
What we advise clients on is a need for absolute objectivity, the decision should be borne out of the available facts and data. Once the case for change has expired, e.g. the ROI has ceased to warrant continuation, attention now needs to swiftly turn to the softer, more people focussed impacts.
This is often the moment for the Executive Sponsor to step up. They will need to decide on the severity of the collateral damage and carefully manage the path ahead. Here we advise clients to run lessons learnt workshops, sessions where the retained project team can add value to the business when they consider such a project next time around. In our experience, such workshops go a long way to making the team feel like their efforts (whilst it might feel like it now), have not been in vain.
Of course, in some of the faster moving organisations, (especially those that are very successful, with deep capex budgets), might have a founder CEO equipped with an innate ability, call it intuition/gut feel, to just call a STOP and move on. That same intuition will lead to decisions on collateral damage, and in such scenarios, the culture of the organisation will enable the impact to be reduced.
The key takeaway is for the Executive to continue to pay attention, both in assessing trends that arrive at a need to decide to STOP, and on the down-stream impact of making that decision. Learn the lessons and embed these back into the culture of the business". Warren Kwei, EA Senior Managing Partner