Project Termination

Question

I was recently working with a team to develop an online system. We had worked for several months and were making good progress when the project got canned. We all felt strongly that the projects completion was important and that it would have great outcomes on our consumers productivity. After being frustrated for a while I thought I should ask some people with more experience.

What is the best way to deal with the frustration of a canned project and move forward so that it doesn't hold future possibilities back?

Answer 1

Don't put your heart and soul into someone else's project?

I do a lot of work for different people and while some projects are more interesting than others they're not my projects so I wouldn't be too broken up if they got canned. I've got my own stuff I'm working on. No one can terminate those projects but me.

Answer 2

Grieve. Such a loss will produce a grief reaction. Not one as strong as though you had lost a loved one, but it's a grief reaction nonetheless, complete with all those stages of grief.

Answer 3

On a well designed project, some of the code you developed can be reused in future projects, making it worthwhile. Even if you can't use any of it however, you and your team probably gained valuable experience that will help in the future as well. Think of it as an expensive team exercise.

Answer 4

This can be used to bring your team closer together, if you have the right sort of people. There is nothing quite like working hard on something you believe in and then having it canned. It can depress, but it can also motivate people to want to prove next time that they can do the job, that they had the right idea.

It helps to galvanize the team; we were there, we worked hard, and it was taken from us.

Of course, it's better not to be in that situation to start with, but when you find yourself there use it to build the team.

Answer 5

Sunk cost cannot be used as a reason for the continuance of a project. If the leaders have made a business decision then I'm sure that it is well motivated, however upsetting.

I'd console yourself in that big swings should be celebrated in business, big companies do not win every bid and complete every project they start. So console yourself in having lost once, maybe you might be able to change the way things were done, or focus more on the project stakeholders as well to make sure they understand why your project is worth completing compared to the other projects and business initiatives at the company.

I'll finish with my favourite saying:

"Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement."

Learn from it!

Answer 6

Failure is the best (and sometimes only) way to learn new things, even if the failure is not your fault. There are many different angles by which you can salvage useful information from this:

1. Code that is reusable
2. New technologies or skills garnered from the project
3. Lessons about project management based on how the failure was handled (maybe the project should have been canceled much sooner, before the team bought into it)
4. Non-technical ideas that you can reuse in other projects for the company or even in your own endeavors.

I highly recommend doing a postmortem, but don't dwell. Most projects get canned at some point in their cycle and if you let it affect your morale, it becomes a downward spiral from which it's hard to recover. You may become oversensitive to even slight requirements changes.

Answer 7

Attack every project as though it were your own. By this I don't mean invest all of your emotions (as stated here already by Spencer Ruport). But write all your code and organize all your code in a manner that you can easily pull out tools that you might need in the future. You never know if you will need it...but odds are you will. If you write an account manager app...do it in a modular reuseable fashion. If you write an image uploader...write it in a way that it can be ported to any other project you have. Write helper functions around all of your major features to make it more user friendly down the road.

This of course requires some planning prior to losing the gig! No worries. It rarely is because of you that you (the whole team) loses the gig. Some financial decision or business decision is usually at play. In this case most likely the economy is what killed you. In the case that you don't have any physical benefits to the failed project...look at it as a learning experience. Inevitably...no matter how good you are...you probably had something that you did that you don't or no longer agree with. Learn from that. You most likely also did something very cool that you loved. BLOG ABOUT IT! This serves two purposes..you just created something tangible from the project...and you put it somewhere that you won't forget about it.

Sucks all the way around. But at least there is a great market out there right now! Contact me directly if you want my headhunter list (80 technical recruiters in CA and the US).

Answer 8

Two things:

Your Investment in the Project & Code: The fact your team had such strong feelings for the project & were so frustrated on it being canned is a good sign - it means you are a true developer/programmer and are not just doing a half-job for full-pay. So to deal with the project being canned: know you & your team are committed to your work & while that project may not have panned out, you guys sound like a real credit to that project & any other you may work on. It sounds like you just need to find a project/opportunity that has the legs.

My Experience: Projects get canned for all sorts of reasons - budget, lack of confidence from stakeholders, too late to market, changed scope etc. I would enquiry/investigate why your project was canned. If it is budget or lack of stakeholder confidence then it is really good news. It means an opportunity has just presented itself to you & your team. Consider pursuing it!

Either way your team will have grown from the experience: both technically & from a business perspective.

Answer 9

Watch a Rocky movie (the last one was good) and have a few beers. There's no way not to put yourself into a project, there's no way to not feel bad about a project being terminated or failing, there's no way not to feel negative about the company. What makes a good programmer better is taking all the emotions, anger, etc. and being able to release it and move on with the same focus and dedication that was there with the first project. All part of life and all part of working in IT.

Answer 10

1. cash the paycheck - that always helps ;-)
2. ask if you can have the rights to the canned project, since they don't want it, then open-source or commercialize it yourself if you think it's worthy
3. it's good to care about your work; it's not so good to obsess over it.

there will be other projects even better than that one in the future; they might also get canned, for any number of reasons both rational and irrational

Good example: I once worked with a lady who spent 2 years on a document-imaging project that was canned a few days before it was supposed to go live; it was canned because the new manager did not like the old manager, and the project was his "pet". This lady's reaction: "I'm looking forward to learning something new!"