Thanks Larry for taking the time from your busy schedule to address these questions.
Q: One of the goals of Lean Project Management (LPM) is to eliminate waste in projects and as you note in your book, one of the biggest wastes is initiating projects that produce goods/services that do not meet customer needs. Along those lines I have rarely encountered organizations that follow a formal process to review in-flight projects and were willing to kill projects that were not on the path to meeting customer needs. Why do you think organizations are unwilling to kill in-flight project and how should we address this issue?
A: My direct experience isn't with product development projects where this issue predominates although I have run into cases where projects shouldn't have started in the first place. The problem with unwillingness to kill projects may relate to some well-known psychological phenomena called the "Sunk Cost Fallacy" and the "Endowment Effect". One way I can see to overcome it is with periodic reviews to specific criteria by people who have no history with the projects and an explicit evaluation method that only allows them to assess the project as if it were a new investment to start at the time of the evaluation.
