Manage Your Project Portfolio, 2nd Edition

Kill a Project

Your second possible decision is the decision to kill a project. The key to killing a project is to make sure all activity associated with the project stops. Sometimes, that’s harder than it should be. (See ​How to Kill a Project and Keep It Dead​ for more information on good ways to kill a project and keep it dead.)

If the need for this project has changed, it’s time to kill the project—and just the project. Move the people to another project. You may find that if a project is too ambitious, you’ll have to kill it. Or it may be that the market has vanished or your organization’s strategy has changed.

The most serious form of killing a project is to stop all work on the project and throw away all of the intellectual property ...