Perspectives · Portfolio Management

Killing Projects Is the Most Sustainable Thing You Can Do

Project management treats completion as the mark of success. We recognise the project managers who rescue troubled initiatives and deliver against shrinking budgets, compressed deadlines, and shifting stakeholder expectations. Persistence is rewarded, and cancellation is treated as an admission of failure.

That instinct is often correct. Projects are difficult, and seeing them through is frequently what separates delivery from premature abandonment. It stops being correct at the point where continuing consumes resources that would produce more value elsewhere. Under growing pressure to account for environmental, social, and economic performance, the reluctance to stop the wrong projects is one of the least examined sustainability problems in the profession.

Continuing a project that no longer creates value consumes money, people, materials, energy, executive attention, and organisational capability. Every month spent on an initiative that should have been reconsidered is a month those resources are unavailable for work that would deliver more benefit. Cancelling a project that has lost its justification redirects finite resources to better use, which is a sustainability decision in its own right.

The sunk cost trap

Most experienced project managers have worked on a project that everyone privately expects to fail, and that continues anyway. The reasons repeat. Money has already been spent. Executives have committed to the initiative in public. Teams have worked on it for months or years. No one wants to explain why the original assumptions were wrong, and there is a standing hope that the next milestone will justify the investment so far.

Behavioural economists call this the sunk cost fallacy: allowing unrecoverable past investment to drive future decisions. It appears constantly in project work, usually without being named. The test that cuts through it is whether, knowing what they know today, the organisation would approve this investment now. When the answer is no, continuing because of what has already been spent rarely improves the outcome, and it usually raises the total cost of the wrong decision.

Sustainability is resource allocation

Discussions of sustainability in project management tend to focus on carbon, waste, and energy. Those matter. Underneath them, sustainability is the responsible use of finite resources: financial capital, specialist capability, executive attention, political goodwill, community trust, and time.

A project that continues without delivering value holds those resources in place and keeps them from other work. The project budget understates the true cost. The larger cost is the set of opportunities never pursued because people remain committed to work that no longer warrants priority. Deciding which projects to stop is part of managing those resources well.

Manage the portfolio, not only the project

Project management asks a project manager to focus on the success of their own project. Portfolio management asks whether the organisation is funding the right set of projects. Consider an organisation running twenty strategic initiatives. Markets move, a technology emerges, customer expectations change, and regulation shifts. It would be unusual for every investment approved twelve or eighteen months earlier to remain the highest priority.

Many organisations keep funding projects because they have already started. Portfolio management sets a different objective: maximise the value of the portfolio as a whole. Meeting that objective sometimes means accelerating a project, sometimes redesigning it, and sometimes stopping it.

Lessons from the energy transition

The energy transition shows the pattern. Over the past decade, governments and companies have invested heavily in renewables, batteries, hydrogen, transmission, and storage. The pace of change has been fast enough that assumptions that were sound five years ago no longer hold. The organisations that have managed this well reassess where capital produces the most long-term value and act on it. Some projects expand, some are redesigned, and some are stopped as technology, economics, and policy move. Changing direction on new information is how adaptive governance works, and project portfolios should be run the same way.

Why organisations find it difficult

Stopping projects is often the rational decision, and it happens infrequently. Part of the reason is culture. Organisations reward initiating projects, securing funding, and delivering outcomes. Launches and completions are celebrated. Few organisations recognise a leader who concludes that a project should not continue.

Governance reinforces this. Stage-gate reviews often check whether planned deliverables have been met rather than whether the investment is still the best use of resources. Reviews become demonstrations of progress instead of tests of the assumptions. In many governance systems, continuing the wrong project is procedurally easier than stopping it. That is institutional inertia, and it produces weak governance.

Redefining success

The profession can define successful project leadership more usefully. A successful project manager gives decision-makers honest, evidence-based advice, including when that advice is uncomfortable. Sometimes the advice is to continue, sometimes to change course, and sometimes to close the project before more resources are committed. That recommendation takes judgement, and it is a form of leadership.

The decision that comes before delivery

Organisations pursuing sustainability goals put effort into making individual projects greener: lower emissions, better procurement, less waste, stronger stakeholder engagement. That work is worthwhile, and it sits on top of a prior decision about whether the organisation is investing in the right projects at all. No amount of sustainable delivery compensates for funding initiatives that no longer create value. Sustainability begins before execution, with decisions about where finite resources are committed and where they are withdrawn.

For project professionals, this widens the responsibility. Delivering projects well is part of the job, and helping the organisation keep investing in work that deserves to continue is the rest of it. In practice that means continuing some projects, redesigning others, and stopping the ones that no longer earn their place before more resources are committed.

Take these to your PMO

• Identify the last time your organisation cancelled a project because it was no longer the best investment, rather than because it had failed.
• Review whether your governance gates test the value of continued investment, or mainly track progress against deliverables.
• Re-approve the current portfolio from a blank sheet, and note which projects would not be funded today.
• Measure how much organisational capability is committed to projects that no longer align with strategy.