Is Your Project like Afghanistan?

The US faces a problem in Afghanistan.  How to define victory?  If you increase spending and resouces, how do you measure their effectivness?  If you decide you want to end the engagement, how do you do get out?

Have you found yourself in this position on projects?  I have.  The project has totally lost sight of what success would be.  All sorts of interium measure are created to show "progress", but no one really knows to what.  Many of the people working on the project have no where to go if the project is cancelled, so their main goal is keeping the project going.  Going in the frantic circle of showing progress, the project becomes more and more of a death march with the progress made becoming smaller and smaller.  Interestingly, the gap between what is reported and what is reality often becomes larger and larger.  

Do you recognize this situation?

There are really only two questions:

1. How do you end it?
2. How do you keep yourself from ever getting in that position again?

How will it end?  The ending is painful.  People are going to have to find new positions, little corporate "white lies" have to be exposed, and if the project is large enough, some people probably leave the company.  It started so well and went so wrong.  I wish there were an easy way to do it, but there isn't.

How to keep yourself from getting into that position again?  There are two steps one can take.

1. Set up SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievabe, Realistic and Timebased) deliverables. 
2. Create contingency plans or exits at major deliverables.  If a project can't reach the deliverable, there is a known way it will end.

These are simple and doable.  Are there other ways people have found to avoid Afghanistan Projects?

Why Thresholds are Important for Project Management

Barry Shore had an interesting post on why it's hard to pull the plug on projects. This caused me to think further about the importance of project thresholds. Threshold evaluations of projects shouldn't be continue/end project decisions, they should be places where the steering committee or project leadership team decides if the project should continue on it's current path or if one of the contingency paths should be followed.

What is a Threshold?
When you have a major project, there should be a few threshold gates (2 to 4) where the steering committee or project leadership team evaluates the progress of the project against predetermined metrics. A decision should be made about whether the project should continue on its current path or if it should go on a different path, a contingent path.

Going into a Threshold Meeting
Unfortunately, often threshold meetings are seen as go/no-go evaluations of a project. Really, they should be evaluations of whether the project is on the correct path currently or if one of the contingent paths or even a new path, is the better way to go.

One of these paths may lead to be project being rapidly ended, but that should not be the only alternative. There should be multiple contingency paths so the leadership can evaluate what is the best route, not whether the project should live.

Have you seen situations where companies have done this? What were your experiences?