Managing a Project Closure? Quickly or Cautiously?

Disengage the Project
To discontinue a project, develop a disengagement plan. It’s just as important as the business plan you created to set up your growth initiative but perhaps because people are so averse to failure, the disengagement plan is often neglected.

This results in lost value and much more misery than necessary. The disengagement plan should be short (five pages at most) but well crafted. It should be a document developed by the project venture team in conjunction with senior managers. It should formally address two critical issues.

1. Stakeholder Damage control. List all the stakeholders who will be disappointed by the disengagement — from investors to suppliers to prospective customers who have indicated interest in the product or service.

• Specify what each disappointed party is hoping for but will not receive.
  
• List the steps that could be taken to mitigate the disappointment. (Your team may have an erroneous perception about stakeholder disappointment, so be sure to check these expectations before you expend any effort fixing what is not broken.)
  
• Mitigation could involve simply apologizing to stakeholders for failing to meet their expectations or, more dramatically, making formal restitution.
  
• Specify who is responsible for ensuring that particular stakeholders have come to terms with the project’s demise.
  
• Leave room in this list for a “closure” notation, indicating that the stakeholder is satisfied. This is important because people tend to avoid or postpone the unpleasant task of damage control; diligent monitoring is necessary to ensure that the project is concluded.

2. Exploit the positives. Begin with an after-action review, in which your team catalogues positive lessons learned from the project experience.

• Take each major aspect of the project — customers, sales channels, technology, and processes — and document your original assumptions, the information on which they were based, and what has been learned.
  
• This analysis provides the backdrop for a benefit /opportunity review, during which the team can unleash its creativity by brainstorming possible applications or innovations from what they have learned.
• These benefits should involve knowledge transfers to other teams, customers, and partners. Clearly, commercial possibilities, such as spin-offs, licensing programs, and joint ventures should be seriously considered.
  

Benefits from Structured Closures
In performing this exercise, you can recoup much of the effort and expense that went into the project, as well as maintaining morale and motivation. If your team members need to be able to end a project in such a managed way as to recognise the difference between a project failure and their positive involvement in bringing it to that conclusion.

They must realise and accept that it was the project that did not succeed, not their part in it. If you can manage this vital task correctly, then you will not only have saved their 'face' and rebuilt their lost confidence but you will have the pleasure of seeing them walk out of the meeting with their heads held high.

Conclusion

Trying and failing is not a mistake, it is the basis of innovation-led growth. The companies that learn how and when to close a troubled project, get better at making good decisions and will make better products.

Given good value-based management and the establishment of repeatable decision making criteria, managed closure of failing projects will always have a greater competitive edge over those that continue to flounder when things don’t go as expected. If you want to gamble on uncertainty, go to the casino!