Jacob Dutton identifies zombie projects: initiatives that drain resources without clear purpose, plagued by lost objectives and endless iteration. Organizations must ruthlessly evaluate their portfolio and kill underperforming work to redirect resources toward innovations that deliver measurable value.
Chapters
If you're facing constraints around time, around budgets, around resources, then you need to be pretty brutal when you're assessing all the different opportunities, the different ideas, the different pilots that you're working on. Because I guarantee that in and amongst all of these different projects will be a ton of waste in the form of what we call zombies. But zombies are opportunities, they're ideas, maybe pilots that you're allocating capital, team members' time to that just don't have a very well-defined or compelling purpose. You know, perhaps you started the project with the best of intentions, but, you know, those objectives have since been lost in a bit of a fog. They could be quite stagnant projects. You know, perhaps they're trapped in a cycle of endless iteration, maybe some delays, internal bureaucracy, or maybe they just don't have any ownership, right? You know, perhaps you don't want to kill them because of internal politics, or fear of failure. And it's these kinds of projects that we see time and time again that just result in a huge amount of waste, right? And in times of deep economic uncertainty, resources are tight, right? We can't keep allocating them to these projects when we need those resources to focus on the things that are gonna legitimize what we're doing as innovators and provide wins back to the core business.
