Toxic Projects

Martin dejectedly handed the message to Jeri, who read it out loud: "You've been volunteered for Amethyst. You'll be working with Weldon and the architecture team." Amethyst was by now the tail wagging the organizational dog, and everyone understood that when it came to Amethyst, "volunteered" meant "indentured."

"Probably the best place to be, if you have to be on Amethyst," Jeri said, trying to console Martin.

"Yeah, right," said Martin, "like the southern Yukon in February."

Amethyst was a "Monster" project — one that gradually claims more and more organizational resources. Monster projects are one type of toxic project. Even when they're "on track," they harm the organization by consuming resources that are much better used elsewhere.

Here are some other kinds of toxic projects.

The Pet

The pet project is funded because its champion not only has the urge to play around with a favorite idea, but also the political clout to gather the resources for the needed toys. What's the cost of not using these resources productively?

The Turnover

Toxic projects
harm their organizations
even when — especially when —
they "succeed"

Some projects are so frustrating and deadly to the morale of the project team that they cause skilled and productive team members to leave the organization. What's the cost of turnover?

The Trap Door

This is a project that commits the organization to a path that severely limits its future strategic options. What's the cost of lost flexibility?

Seawater

People adrift at sea, dying of thirst and desperate, sometimes drink seawater. Organizations do something analogous — they fund projects that seem useful, but which actually threaten the organization. What's the cost of treatment once you realize you've been drinking seawater?

Why don't organizations just cancel toxic projects? Often people don't realize that the projects are toxic, because the accounting system masks their impact.

When we compute project costs, we sometimes understate certain organizational costs. For instance, a Turnover project creates organizational costs that aren't actually charged to the project, such as increased recruiting costs, delays in other projects, and depressed morale. If these costs are recognized at all, they appear as overhead, and they're distributed across all organizational activity using a "flat tax" system that allocates them to all projects in proportion to labor hours, management time, square feet or dollars spent.

But projects differ, and these costs vary by project. A toxic project creates more than its share of these costs, but the organization never realizes it.

What can we do? Decision-makers can assess project toxicity by making a serious attempt to apportion organizational costs fairly. Computing these costs can be difficult, because it feels subjective, but almost any honest effort would be fairer than the flat tax system. Denying the reality of these costs doesn't eliminate them — they're real, they cannot be known exactly, and we must deal with them.  Top    Next Issue

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Related articles

More articles on Project Management:

Restarting Projects

When a project gets off track, we sometimes cancel it. But since canceling projects takes a lot of courage, we look for ways to save them if we can. Often, things do turn out OK, and at other times they don't. There's a third choice, between pressing on with a project and canceling it. We can restart.

Scheduling as Risk Management

When we schedule a complex project, we balance logical order, resource constraints, and even politics. Here are some techniques for using scheduling to manage risk and reduce costs.

An Agenda for Agendas

Most of us believe that the foundation of a well-run meeting is a well-formed agenda. What makes a "well-formed" agenda? How can we write and manage agendas to make meetings successful?

Yet More Obstacles to Finding the Reasons Why

Part III of our catalog of obstacles encountered in retrospectives, when we try to uncover why we succeeded — or failed.

Missing the Obvious: I

At times, when the unexpected occurs, we recognize with hindsight that the unexpected could have been expected. How do we miss the obvious? What's happening when we do?

See also Project Management for more related articles.

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