How to kill a zombie?
When projects are not quite alive, yet not quite dead...
Our portfolio of about 100 business initiatives was diverse: some projects were mature and ready to launch, others were mere ideas, some were already operational but needed scaling. Our mission was simple—move each project to the next level.
But during our monthly check-ins, a troubling pattern emerged.
Some projects weren’t moving at all. Not forward. Not backward. Just... stuck.
When I’d ask why, the answers were always vague: “We’re waiting for an external partner to move,” or “There’s a regulatory milestone that keeps getting delayed,” or “Someone key left the organization,” or “A more urgent priority came up temporarily.”
Yet these stalled projects kept generating monthly updates—sometimes significant, sometimes irrelevant, but always time-consuming. Team members would dutifully report on them, stakeholders would attend meetings about them, resources remained allocated to them. But nothing actually happened.
These projects were neither alive nor dead.
They were zombies.
I’m sure you’ve witnessed such projects yourself. They shamble through your organization, consuming resources without producing results, frustrating everyone involved because they keep reappearing in reports and meetings without ever reaching resolution.
What’s bad about zombie projects is that they don’t just fail to progress—they tie up valuable resources with no evident outcome. What’s worse is the frustration they create, appearing again and again in meetings while contributing nothing meaningful. But the worst part? Zombie projects are contagious. Once you tolerate one, other projects start falling into the same trap.
One day, concerned that a significant chunk of my portfolio was stuck in this limbo, my team and I decided to take action.
We would hunt and kill zombies.
Every quarter, each team member had to come to a dedicated meeting with a specific zombie project. They’d explain the situation in detail. After deeper investigation, we’d give the project owner an ultimatum: show significant proof within one month that the project is back on track, or we proceed to the “zombie killing ceremony.”
The killing ceremony itself was surprisingly simple and powerful. We’d invite all stakeholders—sponsors, project managers, experts, as many people as possible. We’d review the project charter, analyze what worked and what didn’t, extract lessons for future projects, and then formally close it.
Then I’d congratulate everyone for reaching this point. Because yes,
killing a zombie is a victory, not a failure.
Initially, people would look around the room with uncertainty. You could see the confusion on their faces—was I serious about celebrating what felt like defeat? But our team would respond with such genuine enthusiasm and warmth that the energy became infectious. I’d practically beam with pride, thanking everyone for their courage in making this difficult but necessary decision. I’d highlight the lessons we’d learned, the resources we were freeing up, the clarity we were creating. I almost overdid it, being so cheerful and warm about the “victory” that people couldn’t help but start believing it themselves.
Of course, some people were skeptical: “Zombie killing ceremony? You cannot be serious! Is this a circus?”
My response was always the same:
“The playful naming takes pressure off what appears to be failure when it’s actually a major victory. It allows us to have a bit of fun while doing something difficult but necessary.”
The results spoke for themselves. Colleagues from Germany, Turkey, France, Brazil, Australia, South Korea, Poland, the UK—all of them embraced the process. Our project portfolio became dramatically healthier.
But we didn’t stop there. We also streamlined our project creation process so that if a “killed” project ever needed to be revived—if conditions changed or new opportunities emerged—we could bring it back to life instantly, complete with all the learnings from the previous attempt. The lessons we’d captured during the killing ceremony became the foundation for smarter restarts.
🧑💼 The Business Reality
This zombie project story reveals a fundamental challenge in organizational management: the inability to distinguish between persistence and futility, leading to resource waste on initiatives that should be discontinued.
The Portfolio Paradox
The conventional wisdom: Good project managers never give up. Persistence, commitment, and pushing through obstacles are hallmarks of successful execution. Closing projects signals failure, lack of focus, or poor planning.
And there’s truth to this—perseverance is essential. Many successful projects hit rough patches where the natural instinct is to quit. Breakthrough innovations often require pushing through periods of doubt and difficulty. Without persistence, we’d abandon viable initiatives at the first sign of trouble.
But here’s the trap: the same perseverance that makes great projects successful can keep failed projects shambling forward indefinitely. When persistence becomes blind stubbornness, when “never giving up” means throwing good resources after bad, perseverance transforms from virtue into liability.
The reality: The most successful portfolios require disciplined termination of non-viable projects. Resources spent on zombie projects represent opportunity costs—time, energy, and attention that could be redirected to viable initiatives with real potential.
The irony is that organizations often measure project management success by completion rates rather than value creation, creating perverse incentives to keep failed projects artificially alive rather than reallocating resources to better opportunities.
The Portfolio Advantage
Organizations that master zombie project management gain several crucial advantages:
Resource Optimization Resources freed from zombie projects can be redirected to viable initiatives with real potential, improving overall portfolio returns and organizational momentum.
Learning Acceleration Formal project closure ceremonies capture lessons that might otherwise be lost, improving future project selection and execution across the organization.
Decision-Making Clarity Regular zombie hunting forces honest evaluation of project viability, improving the organization’s ability to distinguish between persistence and futility.
Cultural Health Organizations that celebrate intelligent project termination create cultures where honest assessment and course correction are valued over blind persistence.
Innovation Capacity Freeing resources from failed initiatives creates capacity for new opportunities and creative experiments that might yield breakthrough results.
Common “Zombie Project” Scenarios
The Feature That Never Ships
The zombie signs: Software development team provides monthly updates about “progress” on a feature that’s been “almost ready” for six months. Stakeholders keep asking about it in meetings, but launch dates keep sliding.
The reality: Technical debt, changing requirements, or competing priorities have made this feature unviable, but no one wants to admit the time investment was wasted.
The ceremony moment: Analyzing what user needs drove the original request and how current products might serve them differently, then formally closing the feature to redirect engineering resources. Maybe it’s a “cathedral that floats” moment?
The Partnership That Never Materializes
The zombie signs: Business development continues monthly check-ins with a potential partner who’s been “evaluating” the opportunity for eight months. Meetings happen, emails get exchanged, but no concrete progress occurs.
The reality: The partner isn’t actually prioritizing this opportunity but doesn’t want to explicitly say no. Your team wastes time on a relationship that will never yield results.
The ceremony moment: Documenting what made this partnership attractive initially and what criteria to use for better partner qualification in the future.
The Initiative Without a Champion
The zombie signs: A strategic initiative keeps appearing in executive reports, but the original sponsor has moved roles, and no one has clear ownership. Updates happen because they’re scheduled, not because there’s momentum.
The reality: Without internal advocacy and clear ownership, strategic initiatives become administrative exercises rather than business drivers. Often, we fixed this by ensuring we had a “driving force”, a real champion that has “skin in the game” to make things progress.
The ceremony moment: Identifying which elements of the strategy still matter and finding new homes for viable components while officially closing the orphaned initiative.
The Pilot That Never Scales
The zombie signs: A successful pilot program continues indefinitely in “evaluation” phase. Stakeholders debate scaling approaches in monthly meetings, but resources remain committed to serving just the pilot audience.
The reality: Scaling requires different skills, budgets, and organizational commitment than piloting. Without explicit scaling decisions, pilots become permanent small-scale operations that drain resources. Also, let’s be honest, I have seen a lot of those pilots started for the wrong reasons…
The ceremony moment: Documenting pilot learnings, identifying scaling requirements, and either committing to scale properly or closing the pilot to redeploy resources.
🧑🔬 The Science Behind Zombie Projects
Research in organizational psychology and behavioral economics explains why zombie projects persist despite their obvious dysfunction:
Escalation of Commitment Barry Staw, from the University of California - Berkeley introduces in 1981 the “escalation of commitment”. He demonstrates in his research that people continue investing in failing projects partly due to sunk cost fallacies. The more we’ve already invested, the harder it becomes to walk away, even when additional investment is unlikely to yield returns.
Loss Aversion Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory shows that people feel losses more acutely than equivalent gains. Closing a project feels like losing the time and resources already invested, even when continuation represents greater future losses.
Status Quo Bias Samuelson and Zeckhauser’s research reveals that people systematically prefer maintaining current states over making changes, even when changes would be beneficial. Zombie projects persist partly because changing the status quo requires active decisions that feel risky.
Optimism Bias and Planning Fallacy People consistently overestimate the likelihood that troubled projects will recover and underestimate the time and resources required for turnarounds. This makes “just one more month” seem reasonable indefinitely.
Social and Political Pressures Research on organizational behavior shows that admitting project failure can be career-limiting, creating incentives to maintain the appearance of progress rather than acknowledge reality and redeploy resources effectively. This is again raising the question of how we measure success in an organization: by the means deployed or by the outcomes.
🧑🎨 The Art of Zombie Hunting
The key to maintaining healthy project portfolios lies in developing what we might call “resource hygiene”—the discipline to regularly evaluate and terminate non-viable initiatives before they drain organizational energy.
Create Regular Review Rituals
Schedule quarterly “zombie hunting” sessions where teams must identify and justify continued investment in stalled projects. Make this a normal part of portfolio management, not an extraordinary intervention.
Establish Clear Zombie Criteria
Define specific signs that indicate projects should be evaluated for termination: lack of clear ownership, repeated timeline extensions, vague progress reports, missing stakeholder engagement, or resource allocation without corresponding results.
Separate Sunk Costs from Future Value
Train teams to evaluate projects based on future potential rather than past investment. Ask: “If we were starting this project today with full knowledge of current conditions, would we begin it?”
Make Termination Celebratory (AND FUN!!!)
Reframe project closure as learning and resource optimization rather than failure. Extract and document lessons, celebrate insights gained, and emphasize the value of freeing resources for better opportunities.
Address the Social Dynamics
Acknowledge that terminating projects can feel like personal or professional failure. Create psychological safety around project closure and ensure that learning from failure is rewarded rather than punished.
💡 The Key Insight
The healthiest portfolios aren’t the ones with the highest project completion rates—they’re the ones with the discipline to kill zombies before they infect the entire organization. Closing a failed project isn’t admitting defeat; it’s demonstrating the wisdom to redeploy resources toward initiatives with real potential.
When you spot projects that shamble through your organization consuming resources without producing results, remember that sometimes the most productive thing you can do is organize a ceremony. Not to mourn what didn’t work, but to celebrate what you learned and free your team to focus on what actually can.
And don’t forget… using outrageous terms (“ZOMBIES!!!”) doesn’t mean that you are not serious…