When a Project Is Already in Trouble
By the time a project is visibly in trouble — delayed, over budget, or stalled — the instinct is usually to add oversight to the existing team. That often just adds cost to the same decision-making that produced the trouble in the first place.
Why Adding Oversight Isn't the Same as Recovery
An honest recovery review starts differently: by separating what's still salvageable in the original decision from what needs to be re-decided entirely. That distinction matters more than any schedule or budget review, because it determines whether the next twelve months repeat the last twelve.
- Which original assumptions still hold, and which have quietly stopped being true
- What can continue as planned versus what needs re-deciding from scratch
- Whether the sunk cost is being honestly separated from the forward decision
- Whether continuing, restructuring, or stopping is actually the cheapest path from here
Sometimes the correct recommendation is to stop, reset scope, and proceed differently — a harder conversation than continuing, but a cheaper one.
What an Honest Recovery Review Looks Like
Not every distressed project should be rescued as-is. An honest review is willing to recommend stopping — because the alternative, continuing a project whose underlying decision was never fixed, is usually the more expensive choice, just spread out over a longer, quieter timeline.