You’ve just been handed a project that’s haemorrhaging money, missing deadlines, and keeping the CFO awake at night. Sound familiar? Most executives and PMO leads will face this scenario at some point. The question isn’t whether projects will fail, but whether you’ll spot the warning signs early enough to turn them around.
Recognising trouble before it becomes a crisis
Failing projects rarely announce themselves with a dramatic collapse. They deteriorate gradually, often masked by optimistic reporting. Watch for these telltale signs: scope creep without formal change control, team members working excessive hours just to stay afloat, and stakeholders who’ve stopped attending project meetings. When your project manager starts using phrases like “we’re managing the risks” without specifics, or when status reports focus more on effort than outcomes, you’ve got a problem.
The RAID log tells a story too. If risks aren’t being closed and new ones aren’t appearing, someone’s stopped paying attention. Similarly, if every milestone gets pushed back by the same increment each week, your plan has become fiction.
Your first 48 hours matter
When you take over a troubled project, resist the urge to dive straight into firefighting. Spend your first two days understanding what’s actually happening. Talk to the team individually, not just in group settings where people feel pressured to maintain the party line. Read the last three months of status reports. Check what’s actually been delivered against what was promised.
You’re looking for the gap between the official narrative and reality. Is the technical debt mounting? Are stakeholders aligned on what success looks like? Has anyone actually tested whether the solution will work in the real environment?
Then stabilise. Stop any non-essential work immediately. You need breathing room, not heroics. Communicate honestly with sponsors about where things stand and what recovery will require. This conversation feels uncomfortable, but it’s far less painful than continuing to burn resources on a trajectory that won’t deliver.
Setting your project lead up to succeed
Here’s where many remediation efforts stumble. You bring in a new project manager or promote someone from the team, hand them the mess, and expect magic. That’s not fair and it rarely works.
Your project lead needs three things: authority to make decisions without constant escalation, access to the resources they actually need (not what’s left after everyone else has taken their pick), and the skills to handle what’s effectively a turnaround situation. That last point matters more than most organisations realise.
Managing a failing project requires a different skill set from running business as usual. Your lead needs to negotiate with difficult stakeholders, make tough trade-offs quickly, and rebuild team morale whilst delivering bad news upwards. These aren’t standard project management skills. They’re learned through experience or, more efficiently, through targeted coaching.
Getting the help you need
If you’re staring down a troubled project, you don’t have to figure this out alone. Experienced coaching can compress months of painful learning into weeks of focused development. Whether you need support for yourself as you navigate the steering committee politics, or coaching for your project managers who are leading the recovery, the right guidance makes the difference between a turnaround and an expensive failure.
Get in touch to discuss how we can help you build the capabilities your team needs to not just rescue this project, but prevent the next one from reaching crisis point.
Auchenglen Consulting 