Project Turnaround: How to Rescue a Failing Project

No-one wants to have a failing project on their hands. But it happens. And the solution is ‘Project Turnaround’.

So, every Project Manager needs to know how to rescue a failing project. In this review article, we’ll talk you through the five project turnaround steps. These will let you recover your project and set it on an even keel.

‘If you’re going through hell; don’t stop.’

Origin unclear. Often (mis-)attributed to Winston Churchill

What is a Failing Project?

Before we go any further, we must first define what we mean by a failing project. I am going to choose a simple definition:

A failing project is one with severe slippage in schedule, budget, or quality.

The definition of severe (a weasel word) depends on your circumstances. The easiest way to think about it is to ask:

‘Do we still feel in control of the slippage, using our day-to-day monitoring and control processes?’

If you don’t, the slippage is severe, and you need to move into project turnaround mode.

Five Steps to Project Turnaround

At times of stress and trouble, you need a simple process to follow. In this article, I offer a straightforward five step Project Turnaround process.

In each of the steps, I’ll also identify what I consider to be the ‘Critical Success Factors’ for rescuing your failing project.

By the later steps, your project should no longer be failing. But your project turnaround will not be over until two things are true:

1. Your status against your new, approved turnaround plan is ‘on plan’.
2. You have a complete project process in place, that is robust and has been working long enough to give you confidence in its suitability.

Summary of the Five Project Turnaround Steps

So, let’s summarize the five project turnaround steps we’ll be following. You can click the links to skip straight to each step:

1. Spot the Signs of Project Failure
   The first step is to recognize you have a problem, and trigger your Project Turnaround process.
2. Evaluate the Situation
   Now you need to make a critical analysis of what has gone wrong, and what your options are to recover your failing project.
3. Steady your Project
   This is the step where you start to stabilize your project to prevent a worsening of your situation.
4. Rebuild Your Project
   Now it’s time to implement your full project turnaround plan, to get everything back on track.
5. Maintain Your Project
   The last step is to create a sustainable project, which will continue to deliver to your plan, with the minimum of drama.

Now it is time to work our way through these five Project Turnaround steps, one at a time.

1. Spot the Signs of Project Failure

We have already done two large articles on how to avoid project failure:

• Project Failure – Why it Happens
• More Reasons why Projects Fail

You can also get these (with additional content) as an Amazon kindle eBook (US|UK).

How to Avoid Project Failure

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Project failure is all too common
What are the reasons for it, and how can you stop them?

This short video course will give you all the answers.

Learn More about How to Avoid Project Failure

What this step is about

This step is, first of all, about recognizing you have a problem. The sort of things you may notice, or might have alerted others to the problem are:

• Behind schedule or over budget
• Poor quality of deliverables
• Lack of strategic leadership, poor engagement of sponsor, or weak overall project governance
• Misalignment between your project’s goals and the organization’s strategy or your project’s goals and its scope
• Stakeholders expressing concerns or being highly resistant
• Problems with your team, such as poor morale, dissension, or constant conflict
• Scope creep or a build-up of increasingly serious issues

The second key aspect of this step is mobilizing yourself and your team to deal with the problem in the best way possible.

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Take Responsibility

There is a great quote, in the film Papillon. It is said by the character, Leon Dega, played by Dustin Hoffman:

Blame is for God and small children.

Something has gone wrong… or many things. Your priority is to take ownership of the problem, rather than apportion blame. Until you, as the Project Manager, do this, nothing can happen towards rescuing your project.

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Revitalize Project Management

The best option is usually for the project turnaround to be in the hands of the original project manager. And this is entirely possible if you do accept responsibility for it. But there is one other thing that can get in the way: you are doubtless exhausted mentally, physically, and emotionally. Whilst you won’t have the luxury of a proper break, you do need to take some time out to take a step back, breathe deeply, and re-energize yourself.

Some will say that we should always put our project turnaround in the hands of a new Project Manager – even a whole new team. I disagree. But, if the current PM is not able to re-energize her or himself, then there is a strong case for a new Project Manager.

It is also worth considering whether your sponsor or Project Director is able to help the situation. Or are they more likely to hinder things? If the latter is true, are you able to manage the politics to get your project a new sponsor. That can be an ideal way to help you revitalize yourself and your team, where sponsorship is a causal issue.

Do take a look at our article, ‘Resilience for Project Managers: How to Build it and Regain it‘.

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Focus

You’ll be starting to notice that Critical Success Factors (CSFs) come fast and furious at the start of your project turnaround. This is a key time, and the next one is to dedicate your entire focus on the troubled project at hand. Put everything else aside.

The exception is your wellbeing. When you start the process of rescuing a failing project, it can quickly become all consuming. But this airline safety principle applies:

Put on your own Oxygen mask, before helping others.

If you don’t take time to maintain your own mental, emotional, and physical wellness, then you will not be able to serve your project well. Take a look at our article: Resilience for Project Managers: How to Build it and Regain it.  And also have a listen to our podcast: Podcast: Project Management and Resilience.

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Gather the Facts

At the earliest stage of your project turnaround, gather the facts, information, and knowledge you’ll need to figure out what is going on, and what are your options for recovery. Inventory all of your resources:

• Sponsors and advocates.
  These are the organizational supporters, who will be able to help you access resources and liaise with the less sanguine stakeholders
• Mentors, advisors, and coaches.
  These are the people who can guide and support you through the difficult times ahead. This is likely to include your Project Management Office, or PMO, if you have one.
• Technical experts, old-hands, and key team members.
  These are the people who can pitch in and help you understand and solve the problems you’ll face.
• Budget contingency, material resources, and assets.
  These are the cash and things you can call on, to help you as you dig your project out of its hole.

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Communication

We’ll come back to this time after time, in this article. It’s crucial. At this stage, you need to think about two things:

1. Notify stakeholders that you are aware of the problems and have taken responsibility for addressing them. Give them an idea of your next steps and target timescales. It’s vital to show that someone is in control.
2. Call together your team (or, for a very large project, your core team). You’ll need them to work the problem, but first, you’ll need to assert your control, and settle their nerves.

2. Evaluate the Situation

It should go without saying that your next step is to analyze your situation. And for that, you’ll need to get your team together.

Calm Demeanour

There’s often a sense of panic around a failing project. Your team will take its emotional response from you. So project an air of calm, rational, optimism. Avoid a ‘happy-clappy glass-half-full’ style. But, at the same time, be positive about what you hope to achieve, and show a calm, deliberate purpose to your actions.

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Team Re-motivation

All of your actions need to work towards steadying your team. You need to re-motivate them with a strong sense of purpose and a desire to win-out over present difficulties. Demonstrate your trust in them, their motivation, and their abilities. Acknowledge the strengths each member brings, and the successes they have had in the past. Also discuss the value and meaning that the project represents, and therefore why recovering it is important.

Build a ‘War Room’

This won’t always be possible. But where you can, create a central workspace for your Project Turnaround team. Here is where you need to gather all the data, facts, and key documents. Bring together all your key decision-makers and technical experts. And provide them with the technical facilities (like communications, whiteboards and flip charts, and AV systems) that they will need, to do their jobs effectively.

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Review the Project

Do a ground-up review of your project. Look at its charter, business case, plans, and status. You need to understand the history of what its sponsors intended, and how it came to its present state.

Analyze the root causes of the project’s problems. There are two questions to focus on:

1. Why is your project failing?
2. What are your points of control?

As a result of your review, you need to be prepared to redefine any aspect of your project, its scope, and its business case.  The endpoint of your review needs to be a clear re-affirmation of your goal.

Look for Quick Wins

Quick wins – the proverbial ‘low-hanging fruit’ – can be a diversion. But there is no doubt that they can re-energize your team and give your project turnaround some much-needed momentum. So, avoid an over-focus on small wins, but allow the team to pursue a small number of well-chosen initiatives of this type.

Especially valuable quick wins are those that create a positive reputational impact that you can use for PR purposes. Even better, are those that address the needs of highly critical and vocal stakeholders, whom you feel a need to win-over. this may be because their support is valuable or, simply, because their constant criticism is as distraction that drains your team’s energy.

Look for Extra Resources

It is not always going to be possible to secure additional resources for a failing project. You may need to earn the right to bid for them, with some solid progress. But, if it is necessary (and you consider a reasonable likelihood of success, start your bid for extra:

• Resources
• Budget
• Time

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Stakeholder Engagement

Start the process of systematic stakeholder engagement. Begin communicating clearly and frequently, and start with owning up to problems, resetting expectations, and answering questions. If you don’t, rumors and gossip will dominate the narrative. These soon lead to rants and recriminations that will distract you and your team from the real work of fixing problems and turning your project around.

We have a comprehensive article on Project Stakeholder Engagement, which links to all of our detailed resources: ‘Project Stakeholder Management Knowledge Area: A Guide to Stakeholder Engagement‘.

Relaunch Your Project with Your Team

Move to the next stage with a re-launch team meeting. This is rather like a project kick-off, but needs to explicitly acknowledge the mistakes of the past, and the realities of your situation.

It’s worth noting that you want a less dramatic message to stakeholders. In their minds, re-launch proves that the project has failed. For them, the message is that you are aware of failings and setbacks, and that the team has taken concerted efforts to regain control.

3. Steady your Project

Before you can start to properly turn your project around, you need to stabilize it, and prevent it from getting worse. So, this is the stage where you re-assert control.

Rebuild Morale and Confidence

Your project re-launch was a start to rebuilding your team’s morale and confidence. But it needs to remain a constant theme through this stage. Adopt an open, no-blame culture, and be supportive throughout.

Let People Know You’re in Charge

You must not take a heavy-handed approach to bossing your team around, at this stage (or ever). It diminishes their self-confidence and leaves them not believing you trust them. And all this is less important than the fact you’ll stifle their inventiveness and enthusiasm.

But equally, your team’s trust in you is essential. They must feel that you are in charge, and in control of what’s going on. This means being aware of everybody’s work, willing to help when team members need it, and able to make quick and effective decisions, when called for.

Servant Leadership

For me, the perfect approach to leading your project is ‘Servant Leadership’. I’ve written about it in ‘How Servant Leadership can Deliver Better Results from Your Project Team‘. If you are in a hurry and just want a quick explanation, we also have a video: ‘What is Servant Leadership? Project Leadership at its Best‘.

Continue Building Relationships with Stakeholders

It’s not just team members for whom trust is essential. Continue keeping your stakeholders close, and sharing progress with them. Listen to their perspectives and, where possible, take account of their ideas, suggestions, and preferences.

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Re-focus and Adjust Team Allocations

I have already stated my view that, ideally, you will work with the same team through your project turnaround. You may need to bring in some additional help, and maybe release some team members. But each action introduces difficulties of its own:

• Introducing new team members in testing times can drain resources as much as supplement them. So be sure to bring in new team members who can fit in quickly, and contribute rapidly.
• Releasing team members can erode trust from those who remain, possibly pleading to fear for their jobs. If they were close to the team member who has left, there may also e some element of resentment.

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Solve Technical Problems

This is a bit of an obvious point, I think, but it needs to be said. Start working on the technical problems that are causing your project failure, so you can bring them to a rapid stop.

To help you with problem-solving, we have an article: ‘Problem Solving: A Systematic Approach‘.

Prioritize Tasks

You are bound to have a huge amount on your plate, so it is essential that you prioritize what tasks you allocate to your team, and which ones you set aside.

The same goes for you. I strongly recommend that you prioritize full-time project management, rather than getting sucked into leading on any particular task. But, if this is not possible, always apply the materiality test:

How material is this task, to turning around my project?’

Critical Turnaround Success Factors: Create a New Plan

By the end of this stage, you need to have a new project plan. This needs to create a new baseline. So feel free to abandon any of the assumptions from the original project plan. Start afresh, from now.

Some people use few milestones in their project planning. You’ll need to create a sense of momentum and a series of successes for your project. So now’s the time to plan more, smaller milestones; yardstones, if you like: even inchstones!

Crashing Timelines

Crashing timelines is a reference to a set of actions and initiatives that allow a Project Manager to rapidly accelerate project progress. This may be a necessary step in your project turnaround. So, it’s a topic we shall return to in a future article, you can be sure.

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Full Risk Review

As you head towards stabilizing your project, you know you’ll need to keep it that way. So, now it’s time to do a thorough risk review. Use this to ensure you have:

• a comprehensive list of threats to your project
• an up-to-date assessment of the levels of threat
• robust plans to address risks
• suitable team members allocated to each risk action

Invite External Review (maybe)

This may feel like the last thing you want to do. On the other hand, it can have huge benefits to have an objective pair of independent eyes on your project. It also sends out a message of openness and confidence. So, do consider this as a real option.

4. Rebuild Your Project

Guess, what?

During this stage of transforming your project into healthy, you need to work hard, work steadily, and focus on:

• Outcomes
• Team members
• Communications with stakeholders

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Work the Plan

But don’t just blindly follow your plan. Keep speaking with your team members, so you and they are constantly alert for the need to further adjust your direction. Things have gone wrong before, so it’s safe to assume that only constant vigilance will prevent it from happening again.

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Communications Plan

Now is the time to develop a comprehensive stakeholder communication plan that will carry you through this stage and the next.

Team communications are equally important, and we also have a big article on that topic.

5. Maintain Your Project

This stage is about creating a new normal for your project.

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Systematize Processes

Research shows that the organizations which are least likely to suffer project failure are those with standardized project methodologies, with established project processes. And, those which do, are also the ones which are most successful in their project turnaround efforts. So start to systematize effective processes, to build a new operating model for your project.

Take a look at: ‘Project Lifecycle and the Project Process: 5 Tips | Video‘.

Diligent Implementation

Of course, no process is effective, without the hard work of following the process rigorously and constantly reviewing its suitability.

Team Checkpoints

I’m sorry to keep banging on about this, but keep checking in with your team members; both individually, and as a whole team. This will keep you aware of what they are doing, and allow you to constantly monitor and supplement their motivation. Make a habit of catching people doing good work, and commenting on it. A little recognition and appreciation go a very long way.

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Frequent Lessons Learned Sessions

Often projects go wrong when the Project Manager leaves Lessons Learned reviews to the end. Mistakes have been made, but they get repeated, because we aren’t learning the lessons as we go. D’oh!

Frequent lessons learned meetings provide an opportunity to:

• Spot and correct process mistakes
• Share good practices and start to embed them
• Recognize and congratulate good performance

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Monitor and Control Cycle

Whether you use the model of the OODA Loop, the Plan-Do-Check-Act Deming Cycle, or the basic project management Monitor and Control model, constant attention and correction are vital to keeping your project on its new track.

Different projects will use different measures to gauge progress and variance. Consider using a combination of:

• Earned value
• Issue management
• Deliverable quality and defect rates
• … and any others.

Build Self-confidence

Your ultimate goal is to build a new self-confidence in your team. They need to feel they are in control of your project and can continue to steward it to a successful conclusion. If you can do that, and provide evidence that this confidence is well-placed, you have succeeded in your project turnaround.

So, what else is there?

Critical Turnaround Success Factor: Celebrate Successes

Nothing builds confidence like celebrating successes. So once you are into your steady-state, create space in your project cycle for a team celebration. Keep them small, because the big celebration will come later…

When you successfully complete your project.

What are Your Tips?

We’d love to hear your tips and advice for Project Turnaround. Have you had to rescue a failing project? What did you learn from your experience?

Another Point of View

Friend of OnlinePMCourses, Joseph Garfield has a similar approach to Project Turnaround to our own. But Joseph, who runs Phase3 IT, specializes in consulting on and managing IT projects for his clients.

Joseph has produced a wonderful, free, eBook called ‘How to Rescue Any IT Project’. If you want his perspective on the topic – that complements our own nicely, then do download his eBook. And, of course, if you are in the Southern US and need IT project support, do get in touch with Joseph.

‘How to Rescue Any IT Project’ by Joseph Garfield is free to download from the Phase3 IT website.

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