Eugene M Murray’s First Response on Linked
First, remember what a sunken cost represents – that is, funds that have already been spent. Many of my clients unconsciously seemed to assume that some how the completion of the project would not only earn the original expected benefits but recapture this sunken cost already lost!

Mike Ellison has very good advice. For several projects, I just started by implementing what is call a positive, forward looking weekly management reports process. The whole notion takes some explaining so I will just give the expected result. Have people report what they have completed for the last 2 weeks and report what they are expecting to complete this week and forecast the next week (submitted on Friday). Have your lower level project leads review these reports in a staff meeting on Tuesday morning (why – another long explanation). The basic result is to emphasis completion and thus success – personal success at every level.

1 – This keeps things moving
2 – Starts to develop an attitude of personal participation in the completion process
3 – Keeps the focus on positive, forward looking behavior while you minimize the “protect your a__” attitude that is usually a present hold over from the past (another type of sunken cost).

While this process is ongoing, review these weekly reports and ask that each groups manager summarize what their people expect to accomplish and how that aligns with their major business goals. Yes, your are asking them to repeat somethings but this simply re-enforces how their completion focus aligns with what their people are doing – more simplistically if you can’t write it down – you probably can’t do it. (If this process becomes a bit repetitious – you are making good turn-around progress by increasing the amount of work they are doing while reducing your time so that you can move on. Enjoy this, the real work with the big payoff is coming!)

Concurrently, review the risk factors in conjunction with major tasks – many times there are immediate results reported in the weekly reports that you can capitalize to make forward jumps in the completion process. Also, this gives you a fast chance to put your energy into supporting the best positive, forward looking near completion results. (Again, they increase their completions while you decrease you time so that you can move on.)

That usually take care of the first three weeks. Week 4 – you should start by partitioning the project into major business benefits forecasting so that you can make a positive, forward looking projection of how to bring the whole project to its final completion; the partition help with proper scoping of the project. This is called a re-targeting process – a heuristic estimate so that you can start realign completion work (now that you have gain more people’s participation) for completing the project.

This process was used to bring early success to the IT development of the Toyota Motors, USA National Part System in just one year. Revenues at start was $85 million and 3 years later revenues were up to about $500 million – but basically the IT goals where completed in the last year and the system accommodated the greater increase in business. The 4th year produced even more completions.

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Topic: How can a PM effectively overcome a project handed to them in the red?