A paused project feels safe. It isn’t. While it sits idle, teams disperse, knowledge fades, technology moves on, contracts lapse, and stakeholder support quietly erodes. The project that made sense to pause in March can be much harder to restart by fall, and probably more expensive.
Our new article, A Practical Assessment for Project Suspension, Restart, and Termination, gives sponsors, steering committees, PMOs, and portfolio managers a structured way to answer the question every paused project eventually faces: restart, restructure, keep waiting, replace, or end it? It comes with a free, open-access assessment tool you can apply directly.
In under an hour, the assessment surfaces:
- Whether the value case still holds
- What knowledge, skills, and technical assets actually survived the pause
- How restartable the project really is now in practice, not just based on paper or personal wishes
- The true cost of remobilization, rework, and compliance catch-up
- Which path does the evidence actually support: restart, restructure, continued suspension, or termination
It won’t make the decision for you. It will make your assumptions visible, flag weak evidence, and give your governance discussion something sharper to argue about.
This work extends the ideas in Flexible Projects (EPUB, Kindle, paperback), which shows how Real Options Analysis and disciplined governance let leaders stage investment, preserve choices, and make clear-eyed stop-or-scale calls under uncertainty. The book is about designing flexibility in from day one; the article and tool are for the moment a project has already stalled.
Uncertainty never goes away. Projects fail less when it’s governed — deliberately, at every pause.
Read the article
Use the open-access assessment tool
Buy the book: Flexible Projects