Why and How You Cancel Projects

Phil is a UK-based PPM practitioner with a background in IT project management. He holds the PMP, PRINCE2 and Managing Successful Programmes certifications, and has a keen interest in leveraging best practice and quantitative management techniques to strategically transform organizations.

  Benefits Realization   Estimating   Manufacturing   Organizational Project Management   Strategy  

If you work in project management long enough, eventually you come across everything. Unfortunately, this includes having a project you were working on being cancelled. This can be difficult because we are often personally invested in projects, and seeing all that hard work seemingly go “down the drain” can be difficult. In this article, I give some consideration to cancelling projects—discussing why it might be done and how it should be handled.

Firstly, to ask the obvious question: Should projects ever be cancelled? Yes. The alternative is to suggest that all projects—no matter how late, overspent or misguided they have become—should be permitted to go on indefinitely. That clearly doesn’t make sense, so we need to accept the hard truth that cancelling a project is sometimes the correct decision.

However, rather than seeing it as a purely negative event, I suggest that cancelling projects does actually have some positive aspects. There is always the temptation to continue to throw good money after bad, to keep plugging away at projects for just a bit longer, to work just a bit harder. But for an organization to push back against this tendency implies that it has an effective understanding of the true status of each of its projects and the current state of each associated business case. It suggests it has a strategic vision, with …

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