Managing project/programme crisis

Challenge

When a project critical for the organisation slips into crisis, for example by significantly exceeding its budgets or lagging behind schedule, a questions is asked about its future. Can such a project be recovered? Will it be able to produce the expected deliverables? Or perhaps a decision to close it would be the best solution?

If the project is critical to the organisation, a quick but detailed analysis of the available options and their consequences must be performed and the agreed actions must promptly be taken.

Carrywater’s solution

We analyse the root causes of the issues and recommend further steps concerning the project or programme at hand.

While preparing the recommendation, we take the as-is status of the project into account, including its current progress stage, level of budget deficit and schedule delay and the estimated likelihood of its successful completion. We also bear the determination of the project’s sponsor in mind as well as the skills and the methods employed by the project team. We analyse various paths of action available and their consequences.

If there are legitimate grounds to continue the project, we follow the disaster project recovery approach and prepare and implement appropriate corrective measures. For the ventures which have no business justification to be continued (e.g. the opportunity which the project was built for is gone) or which bear unacceptable level of risk if continued, we recommend a controlled project closure which shall minimise the losses for the organisation.

By relying on the long years of our experience and the recognition of our experts, we can implement radical changes in the organisation in a way that is optimal for the organisation and oriented towards recovering its project from crisis, or perform a controlled closure of the project.

Business value

We offer performing an end-to-end analysis of the technical causes of the issues experienced, researching the available courses of action, presenting our recommendations on further actions and implementing them.

While taking corrective actions for projects in crisis we leverage the broad experience of our consultants who specialise in managing that kind of situations.

Deliverables

Depending on the scope agreed, our involvement usually produces the following deliverables:

• Root cause analysis
• Recommendation
• Plan of corrective actions
• Plan execution reports