Companies kill projects too fast for anyone to learn what went wrong |
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Companies kill projects too fast for anyone to learn what went wrong
Most canceled projects never get a proper review. If teams skip the debriefs, they carry the same blind spots into their next assignment
Busakorn Pongparnit / Getty Images
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When a flagship R&D project worth $140 million was killed at a large energy technology company, some of the engineers who had spent years building it went on to new assignments almost immediately. No one asked what went wrong or what they'd have done differently. The company simply moved on.
Dean Shepherd and colleagues at Indiana University interviewed 28 engineers from eight terminated projects at the same organization, which employed more than 50,000 people and spent roughly $1 billion a year on R&D. The projects ranged from small material tests to flagship launches worth over $100 million. Several of the engineers said the research interview was the first time anyone had ever asked them to think about what happened. Some started new assignments mere hours after the project was terminated. Others had just a few days to transition. But in every case, the switch happened too fast for anyone to sit down, talk through what went wrong, and write any of it down.
The engineers on projects that died........