Manage Your Project Portfolio, 2nd Edition

Kill Doomed Projects

As you evaluate each project, you might realize you have some doomed projects in your portfolio. Here are some questions to ask if you suspect your project is doomed:

• When do we need this project to release? Do we have enough time to do something useful before that date?

• Can we make progress fast enough to meet the market window?

• Do we have people with problem-space domain expertise to staff this project?

• Do we have any insights into what real customers might want out of this project?

• Do we know our Cost of Delay for this project? (Cost of Delay is when you release a project later than you intended and you don’t receive the expected value from that release.)

Let’s take each one of these in turn.

“We don’t have enough time ...