On September 4, 1957, the Ford Motor Company introduced the Edsel to directly compete with GM's Oldsmobile brand. It didn't take long before Ford recognized it had made a costly mistake. On November 19, 1959, Ford decided to pull the plug on its $350 million ($1.55 billion in today's dollars) good idea gone bad.Regardless of the project management tools you use, successfully managing project-based work sometimes requires that project managers recognize when good projects have gone bad and pull the plug before too many resources are needlessly wasted. Thankfully, most project managers aren't staring at $1.5 billion project that needs to be terminated—but I know of one organization that saved an estimated $8-10 million by pulling the plug on an Edsel of a project.
Ideally, the criteria for putting a DOA project out of its misery should be determined prior to the project beginning. What's more, project management best practice suggests that the "firing squad" should be identified before the project begins too. Sometimes in the heat of battle, it's difficult to dispassionately consider discontinuing a troubled project.
There was no single reason why the Edsel failed. Styling, quality, and a lack of internal support at Ford have all been cited as possible reasons. However the Edsel was manufactured in the same factories as its more successful siblings, Ford and Mercury. The same can be said for most projects that struggle—there's seldom a single reason why a project fails. Regardless of the reasons, scrapping a doomed project is difficult for most project managers. That being said, I often think of Henry Ford and how he killed the car he named after his son.
How do you determine when to scrap a lagging project?
