Research How to Get Better at Killing Bad Projects - Ronald Klingebiel, HBR

This resource first appeared in issue #69 on 09 Apr 2021 and has tags Strategy: Prioritization

Research: How to Get Better at Killing Bad Projects - Ronald Klingebiel, HBR

As we talked about at the start of the year, it’s hard to stop doing things, even when they don’t make sense any more. As Klingebiel reports, even big companies with well-established stage gate processes for advancing projects are tempted to fudge the requirements to let struggling projects advance and take up more resources - especially when the requirements that are struggling are (the more important!) external user requirements which are about the future and nebulous users, as opposed to the very salient internal struggles like technical difficulty.

To avoid the problems seen by Sony Ericsson in this study, Klingebiel recommends:

• Don’t look for “proof” of failure - there’ll never be such proof
• Look instead for projects that are demonstrating promise and move resources into them
• Focus on external user needs (in their lingo, the business case)