What do you do with a hand-over Project that you consider Rotten?

George -

Go fishing with the worms in its core :-)

Flippancy aside, as others have indicated, do sufficient analysis to understand whether this is mission impossible or not. If it is not a viable project based on current expectations and baselines, influence and determine whether it can be made so. If not, decide whether or not you want to go down with a sinking ship as its new captain...

Kiron

I just finished a project that i, at the beginning though it was "rotten". Rotten in the sense that the sponsor was not a business department. It was a project sponsored by the engineering, but with a great impact on the business side. Business agreed upon the project with the assumption that will not have impact on their customers. Although it was a project that would benefit the organization it hadn't the visibility of a "business" sponsored project. It was very challenging at the beginning, cope it the difficulties of leading a project to which the business personnel didn't see the advantages. I had the luck to have on the team two members that push forward. It's a long history but i found it at the end that it wasn't so "rotten" as i thought. It was a success for internal and external customers and a real case study of misconception. I learned that all the projects i manage must have the same care and opportunity.

What means "rotten"? Scope creep, over budget, poor quality....?
Nevertheless, talk to project stakeholders first to get an ideas about the big picture, constraints and reasons from their perspective why the project is in trouble. Have in-depth discussions with the project team to further understand possible reasons (avoid group thinking). Work out a roadmap with actions to get the project back on track and where needed require decisions from stakeholders.

Before accepting any project I:
1. Thoroughly review the project plan to determine the project's state
2. Document the project’s state, and communicate it to the Sponsor and relevant stakeholders

This prevents the previous PM from mismanaging a project, passing it to me before its problems become evident, and then attributing its problems and possible inevitable failure to me. I've seen PMs bolt from projects they ruined more than once, so I never accept a project before assessing it – doing so would be as dangerous as purchasing a house without first performing a thorough home inspection.

Needs doubled efforts from PM.

Sante - yes, short response; but can we bring back to life something that is Rotten?

Rotten here I mean, "decomposing or decaying; putrid; tainted, foul, or bad-smelling" no fix.

I would be interested in a detailed answer