It was 1989, and I was on a business trip with 10 colleagues. I was then a project manager for a new Air Force aircraft, and my friends were developing a missile that our aircraft would someday carry. We all went to dinner early, so we could be back for President George Bush's televised address to the nation. His topic was defense, and he might even mention our projects.
Did he ever: The President wasn't 10 minutes into his talk when he cancelled my friends' program outright. It's the total silence in the room that I remember most: I didn't think 11 people could make so little noise. I muttered a few words of condolence, but there was nothing I could say that would ease their pain.
That's the way projects sometimes end, not in a victory parade but in stunned silence, with project teams trying to absorb crushing news. It's often not an issue of fault: Projects die for all sorts of reasons—changes in top management, budget cuts, new threats in the competitive landscape, to name just a few. But no matter the reason, terminations never are easy, and they're usually traumatic.
Jim Gallagher, a director of PMI, has 40 years experience in project management. One of his earliest jobs was with a spacecraft called the X-20 “Dyna-Soar,” cancelled in 1962. “We were really pushing the state of the art, but the Kennedy administration didn't want the Air Force in the space business. The termination—‘for the convenience of the government’—was just devastating, especially on the contractor side. Morale was terrible—people totally lost interest, just closed up their offices and walked away. The few of us who were left had a terrible time just trying to go through the files.”
Terminations do not have to be so bleak, however. With strong project leadership, the trauma of termination can be minimized. In researching this article, a number of people told me that I needed to meet with “Fred,” who had overseen the most successful termination in their memory. “Fred” (who preferred to remain anonymous) ran a project involving hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of dollars. The vehicle they were developing was on the cutting edge, in terms of both manufacturing technology and system performance. Testing was rigorous, and test failures had cost the project some top management support.
Still, Fred said that the termination was a blow: “We had to present our story to top management, and when we broke for lunch our future looked pretty bleak. But things turned around later in the day, and we were told to press ahead with the test program. The very next day, though, all our funding was zeroed out. People were really hurt, because we thought we had turned the tide.”
Unlike other terminations, the morale of Fred's project team may have bent, but it never broke. One key was the quick transition from one set of objectives to another. Prior to the cancellation, the project's objectives were along the usual lines of cost, schedule and technical performance. Post-termination, Fred set a whole new set of objectives: “We tried to do something positive with every aspect of the project. We wanted to complete the test program with the money we had left, and we wanted to ensure that the technology we had developed was transitioned to other projects. We had facilities, tools and specialized test equipment, and we found other programs that could put all that to use. We wanted to keep the team together to close out the contracts, and then we needed to find homes for all our folks.”
While the new objectives served to keep the team focused, Fred and his management team attended carefully to the people side of the termination. “People felt bad that we didn't have a chance to see the whole thing through. So we had a wake, and then we had a funeral. It was a big event: People all wore black, and one of our young guys was the ‘priest.’ We put a cross outside the building, with the dates of the program. Everybody had a good time; it was an uplifting sort of thing.”
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Bud Baker, Ph.D., teaches at Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, USA, where he heads the MBA concentration in project management. He is a regular contributor to PM Network and Project Management Journal, and is a member of the PMJ Editorial Review Board.