Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Sixth Edition

Managing Distressed Projects

In general, there are two types of strategies for dealing with distressed projects. Every project that becomes distressed was once not in distress, and there are prevention strategies to minimize the likelihood of projects becoming distressed. Despite your diligence, the prevention strategies might not work due to prevailing conditions beyond your control, and your project will still become distressed. If this happens, there are intervention strategies that you can use. This section describes both strategy types.

Prevention Management Strategies

Prevention strategies are proactive practices and processes that you can employ to significantly reduce the number of projects that become distressed. For the typical company situation, you may be able to enhance some of the processes covered previously in this book to decrease the likelihood of a project becoming distressed. These enhancements are briefly discussed in the next subsection.

Again, it is not possible to eliminate all projects from falling into the distressed category, but you can significantly reduce their numbers. In establishing your prevention strategies, you have to take your efforts to the next level. Considering the high failure rate of projects, I suggest that you take some of the actions described in this section with every project. If for some reason you find these efforts burdensome to do on every project, you might consider them as part of your risk management plan and be more selective ...