Projects are meant to be completed. No one likes to leave unfinished business, right? But there are those situations that come up from time to time where the project can’t be completed or is put on hold. The reasons can be almost endless. The most common include things like customer funding issues, a change in the customer’s organization, customer satisfaction drops to rock bottom, some roadblock arises that can’t be worked around, or perhaps the technology is presenting an unavoidable work stoppage. Whatever the reason, it’s painful and potentially embarrassing and now you may need to move into damage control mode.
When this has happened to me (and yes, I have had this happen a couple of times and it isn’t fun), I generally try to follow as many of the following actions as are appropriate for the situation – depending, of course, on what caused the project to be suspended in the first place:
Keep ongoing contact with the project client. First, it’s critical to stay in close contact with the customer. Even if you or your team were the cause for the work stoppage, stay in touch, make sure they know you’re working on whatever issues caused the stoppage, and discuss criteria or scenarios that might enable the project to restart – so you know what you’re working towards. For me, on a project that stopped because some overwhelming issues put the project way over budget, it involved detailed estimating of what it was going to take to finish the project and some negotiation of what we could absorb on the delivery side and what I still needed the customer to come up with in terms of dollars. But it was contact, ongoing discussion. At least it kept us moving forward and eventually we did restart the project.
As project managers and professionals we’ve experienced many successes as well as failures on the projects we’ve lead and participated on. When you work on or lead a high profile, successful project, it’s human nature to want to rest on our laurels sometimes. Finish a great project, win against all odds, drag a doomed solution through the trials to a successful deployment or perhaps even take over and ‘save the day’ on a failing project….all of these scenarios may make you want to sit back, take stock of what you’ve accomplished and coast for awhile.
When the opportunity arose to lend a hand – and some scheduling prowess – to the 
Here’s an interesting concept – let’s make things better now rather than in the future. Why would anyone want to think differently, especially if it might help their career and the work they are doing at this moment? Experiencing success today is better than postponing success until tomorrow, right?
FastTrack Schedule topped perennial rival Microsoft Project, besting both Professional 2010 and Standard 2010 versions, as well as Oracle’s enterprise-level Primavera P6.
So you’ve been handed a project, possibly your only project or possibly just one more to add to your already overloaded portfolio of active projects…now what do you do? If your organization is a thought leader in project management then maybe, just maybe, you’ve been involved during the very early customer engagement and sales meetings and maybe you’ve been made aware or involved in creating high-level requirements, a general scope of work, the estimation process and the drafting of a shell project schedule that identifies some key milestones and activities. However, if your organization is like most professional service organizations, then the deal is in place, all of the above has happened without your input or knowledge and just now you’re hearing about the project for the first time. It’s not ideal at all, but it is reality. What do you do?
We’ve just released another update to 
