Renee ScottProject Portfolio Manager| Brotherhood Mutual Insurance CompanyFort Wayne, In, United States
In our old process, management did project planning based on a calendar year, so any initiative that crossed over a year would end up being two separate projects on the Op Plan each in it's calendar year--one to start the initiative and one to finish it. We were able to get that process changed so that a project runs it's natural course, but we want to revisit the old closure statuses.
Currently, we classify closed projects as 1) Complete as Planned, 2) Complete but Modified, 3) Incomplete and Dropped, and 4) Incomplete and Carried Over. The latter reflected a project that was planned to end in the previous year, but didn't. This was helpful since we were artificially closing projects that were't done.
Since in the new process, we won't close a project unless it is Complete or Dropped, is it as simple as those two closure statuses? Where we are getting into discussion is a project that had some work done. It could have been analysis leading to a "no-go" decision or a situation where work was done, but the business environment changed, like a 3rd party provider emerged. Are these complete or dropped or do we have a third status? As, the PMO we're trying to avoid having to make a judgement call on whether value was produced by the partial work. I'm just curious how others handle this and whether Completed and Dropped is sufficient.
"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
