Terminate unworthy projects

Best lesson in project management is terminate unworthy projects. I always thought that terminating an unworthy project is bad for "reputation" of company.But, then I came across a book "Project Management by TATA-McGraw -Hill, & the first paragraph was:"The most fundamental objective of a project is to achieve business results.That means providing a certain amount of return on the proposed investment.Yet in too many organizations, management gets complacent, allowing approved projects to proceed without any further assessment of likely payback. As a result, projects that are no longer profitable are allowed to continue on to completion."

We learnt it the hard-way, we took a metro project in Delhi. The management of the project was very poor. There was too much corruption on the project,because of which only preferred vendor's were given priority.We learnt about all this after starting the work. But we continued with the projects as we felt, leaving the project would bring bad name to our company and bear a huge loss.

But, three years down the line, we took one MTS station project in Jabalpur,situation of this project was also same.But, we could minimize our loss as we left the project. 

There are three major points according to the book:

1) stay alert to significant changes: It's a mistake to assume that the project estimate at the beginning

will stay the same to the very end. Situations change, sometimes quickly , so it's not only possible but likely that conditions will change to alter your original assessment of the business case for a given project. Periodically reevaluate the economic viability of every project.

2) Avoid the term "Failure": In too many organizations, early termination of a project is viewed as failure. To the contrary, stopping a project for the right reasons is smart management: it allows management to divert resource to higher -priority efforts.