{"id":851,"date":"2012-05-20T07:33:02","date_gmt":"2012-05-20T13:33:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=851"},"modified":"2012-04-30T08:02:00","modified_gmt":"2012-04-30T14:02:00","slug":"when-do-you-pull-the-plug-on-a-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/851","title":{"rendered":"How do you decide to pull the plug on a project?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over the past six months, I&#8217;ve been involved with two projects that, to put it politely, didn&#8217;t go exactly as planned.<\/p>\n<p>Project A was cancelled, after a significant amount of preparatory work had been done, and project B was just released, after a much more significant amount of effort was expended.<\/p>\n<p>What caused one to be cancelled and the other to be continued?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Timing: A had a tight schedule, with a deadline that made sense from the business&#8217; perspective. \u00a0When it became clear that the deadline would be missed, cancellation was a logical option. \u00a0B had goals but no deadline, which made it harder to make a go\/no go decision<\/li>\n<li>Risk: A required some server rejiggering that would have made it extremely difficult to roll back. \u00a0B, on the other hand, would have been a simple software re-release to roll back to previous, somewhat working, software.<\/li>\n<li>Business impact: A was a &#8216;nice to have&#8217; project, whereas B was addressing something that had caused employees and users pain for years.<\/li>\n<li>Sunk costs: A had fewer sunk costs than B, which paradoxically made it easier to cancel (paradoxically, because you\u00a0should not consider sunk costs when looking at an investment).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>What is the difference between pushing through to finish a difficult project and polishing a turd that you really should abandon? \u00a0It&#8217;s a fine balance, and as project B dragged on, I wasn&#8217;t sure at times which path we were headed down. \u00a0As someone who loves to ship, it&#8217;s hard for me to give up on a project that I had a hand in building, but no business writes software in a vacuum, and those business needs can and do serve as valuable checkpoints on the software process. \u00a0Because of the huge business value, it made sense to push through on project B.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes business priorities change, or, as in the case of project A, deadlines impose a different set of priorities (beyond the purely technical).<\/p>\n<p>Regardless, I think that the more I consider any projects I have dragging on through the lenses of timing, risk, return and sunk costs, the easier it will be to make a go\/no go decision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the past six months, I&#8217;ve been involved with two projects that, to put it politely, didn&#8217;t go exactly as planned. Project A was cancelled, after a significant amount of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-8z","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=851"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":859,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851\/revisions\/859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}