Sometimes it’s important to just know when to quit!

There are two problems I see all the time in the project space …

Businesses undertaking an improvement project to fix something that is too broken to fix.  Sometimes, the thing you want to fix in your business can’t be … and you should make the decision to completely replace it.

There are also times when a business has been working on an improvement for some time and the reality is that they should quit the project and refuse to put any more resources into it.

One of the issues in both these cases is the concept of “sunk cost”.  Put simply, how much money and time has already been “sunk” into this project.  The notion is often held that “we have put so much into this already, that we just need to finish it now.”

The truth is that throwing even more money after a bad idea does not make it any better.

One of the skills of great project managers is the ability and willingness to identify when it is time to stop something.

In business, there are three decision rhythms that matter – what new things do we need to START doing, what great things that we already do, do we need to KEEP on doing and what things that no longer serve us do we need to STOP doing.

It seems entrepreneurs are great at starting, but not so good at stopping things!

Before you start your next new project, I challenge you to first identify at least ONE thing that you need to stop.