The hidden cost of projects that never end
In most companies the project portfolio is not too small. It is too full of initiatives nobody has the nerve to close.
by BVH Consulting2 min read
When we walk into a company and ask for the list of active projects, the answer almost always comes in two stages. First a number: twelve, twenty, forty. Then, after a few minutes of checking, a bigger number.
The gap between the two is the interesting part. These are the initiatives nobody really counts as active, but that nobody has formally closed either: they still have an owner, still take up a budget line, still show up in the quarterly review marked "in progress".
The cost is not the budget
The most common mistake is to measure these initiatives by the budget they consume. It is usually very little: they are stalled projects, not expensive ones.
The real cost is attention. Every open initiative takes up room in management's decision-making capacity: an agenda item, a request for clarification, an owner who has to prepare an answer. Companies do not fail for lack of ideas: they fail because the same fifteen people have to decide about too many things at once.
Then there is the credibility cost. When a company accumulates projects that neither finish nor die, people learn that announcing an initiative implies nothing. The next launch starts with less energy already.
Why nobody closes anything
Closing a project is a public act that looks like admitting a mistake. The owner who proposes it exposes themselves; whoever decides confirms that the money spent so far was badly allocated.
The result is a stable, wrong equilibrium: everyone is better off leaving the initiative in a limbo where it consumes almost nothing and forces nobody to take a position.
What works
The only remedy we have seen hold is to strip closure of its judgement value by defining it before starting.
Exit criteria written at kick-off. Every initiative starts with an answer to one question: what would we need to observe by a given date for this to be worth continuing? If the criterion is not met, closing is not anyone's defeat — it is the application of an agreed rule.
A review dedicated to closures. Not the progress review, where nobody raises their hand. A quarterly session whose only agenda item is: which initiatives are we closing? If the answer is "none", the portfolio is probably more stalled than it looks.
Credit for closing. In organisations that work, killing a weak initiative quickly is something people tell each other about, not an incident to be hidden.
Where to start
Take the full list of open initiatives — the real one. For each, write a single line: what has to be true in ninety days for this to continue. The initiatives where you cannot write that line are already closed. All that is missing is the decision.