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Abandoning vs. Killing Projects

August 15, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Musings

Abandoning vs. Killing Projects
By Johanna Rothman

I haven’t been using the word “abandon” when I describe stopping projects. I’ve been using the word “Kill” and the concepts of permanently stopping projects (killing them) and putting projects on the parking lot (stopping them for now).

Here’s why I’ve been using the word “kill” instead of abandon. I want people to make a conscious decision that this project is not worth continuing at all. (The three possible decisions are commit to; kill; or transform a project.) Abandoning feels more like we can just stop the project in whatever state it’s in and walk away from it.

But I don’t know people who can do that. Every time I’ve seen managers attempt to abandon projects, the technical staff want to wrap things up, or get them to a state where the project can be shelved and restarted again later. That’s why I separate the ideas of stopping a project for now (and putting the project on the parking lot) and killing the project.

Here’s an example of why I feel so strongly about this. I was working for a small company as a developer many years ago. We were not making enough money. Management stopped a project “for a while” where the duration was indeterminate. Over lunch, I asked my boss when we would start it back up again. He said, “Never, with any luck.”

But that’s not what was communicated to the technical staff. One developer said, “Well, management has abandoned this project. But I’m not. I’m going to save this project.” Ouch, not what management wanted and not what the company needed. The company needed us all on a project that could actually make money, not the money pit. But the other fellow thought that management had abandoned the project, not made a decision to stop it. If our management had considered the killing or parking of projects, maybe my colleague would not have continued working on a project that had no future and was diminishing the ability of the company to make money. We would have been in better shape if we had killed that project.

Maybe kill is too strong a word. But if we want to stop a project permanently, I do want to kill it. I don’t want people doing skunk work on it. I don’t want more investigation. I do want it killed. For me, abandon isn’t a strong-enough word.

And, if we can’t sufficiently fund this project now, I want to put the project on the parking lot, or somewhere in the unstaffed work list.

I hope you chime in with your reaction about abandon vs. kill.

This original article can be found at: http://jrothman.com/blog/mpd/2008/11/abandoning-vs-killing-projects.html

Johanna Rothman consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. Johanna is the author of Manage It!’Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management’. She is the coauthor of the pragmatic Behind Closed Doors, Secrets of Great Management, and author of the highly acclaimed Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People. And, Johanna is a host and session leader at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference (http://www.ayeconference.com). You can see Johanna’s other writings at http://www.jrothman.com.

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