When Should a Project Be Stopped? A PPM Perspective

A project can be on budget.
On schedule.
Meeting milestones.

And still be the wrong project.

That is the uncomfortable gap at the heart of project portfolio management. Status reports answer one question well: is this project doing what it was approved to do? They are much less reliable on a second question that matters more to the organisation: should it still be doing it at all?

A project should be stopped, paused or reshaped when the case for continuing no longer holds: when its strategic purpose has faded, its expected value has fallen, its cost to finish has risen, or its capital and people would do more good elsewhere. None of those conditions shows up as red on a delivery dashboard.

Green Tells You About the Plan

A green status is useful. It usually means the project is tracking against its approved baseline: spend within budget, milestones met, risks under control. For a delivery team, that is real achievement, and for a board it is reassurance that the plan is being executed.

But notice what it measures. Green compares the project with its own plan. The plan was built on the assumptions that existed when the investment was approved: the strategy, the market, the cost of capital, the competing demands on the organisation at that time.

Green tells leaders how a project is performing against its plan. It does not tell them whether the plan is still worth pursuing.

If those assumptions have moved, a project can be perfectly on track towards an outcome the organisation no longer needs as much. The status stays green because nothing has gone wrong in delivery. What has changed sits outside the project’s reporting line.

This is the distinction between project performance and portfolio value. Performance asks whether the work is being done well. Value asks whether it is the right work.

The Question PPM Should Keep Asking

The Association for Project Management defines portfolio management as the selection, prioritisation and control of an organisation’s programmes and projects, in line with its strategic objectives and capacity to deliver (APM, Body of Knowledge, 8th edition). Selection is not a one-off event. The word “control” implies that the choice is revisited as conditions change, which is why PPM is moving beyond project selection towards stewardship of the whole portfolio.

The question that stewardship keeps asking is simple:

Should this project still exist?

The answer is rarely a binary choice between carrying on and cancelling. A mature portfolio review has a wider range of options:

Continue as planned, because the case still holds.
Change the scope, so that it delivers what now matters most.
Delay it, releasing capacity for more urgent work.
Pause it, preserving what has been learned until conditions improve.
Rescale it, up or down, to match the value now expected.
Stop it, and redeploy the capital and people.

Stopping is one legitimate outcome among several, not a verdict of failure.

Why Stopping a Project Is So Difficult

If the logic is straightforward, why do organisations continue projects they would not approve today? Several ordinary forces are at work.

Sunk-cost thinking. Money already spent feels like a reason to keep spending, even though it cannot be recovered whatever is decided next.
Organisational momentum. Teams are mobilised, contracts signed and plans published. Continuing requires no new decision; stopping does.
Previous approvals. The people who approved a project are often the people asked to review it, and reversing a decision can feel like admitting an error.
Reluctance to say circumstances changed. A shift in strategy or market can be harder to acknowledge than a delivery problem, because it has no single owner.
Committed resources. People, suppliers and budgets are already allocated, and releasing them has its own cost and disruption.

The pattern is visible in public data. Reviewing how government resets major programmes, the UK National Audit Office noted that stopping a programme rather than resetting it, with costs potentially written off, can be the right decision, and observed that government does not often stop programmes (NAO, Lessons learned: Resetting major programmes, 2023). The mechanics of making stopping routine are explored in the new PPM question: what should we stop?

Four Questions Every Portfolio Should Revisit

A green status answers none of these on its own. Each deserves a fresh answer at every portfolio review, not only at approval.

1. Is the strategic case still valid?

Does the project still serve a priority the organisation holds today? A project aligned with last year’s strategy can drift out of alignment without any change to its own plan.

2. Is the economic case still valid?

Are the expected benefits, costs and timing still credible? Revised demand forecasts, higher costs of capital or cheaper alternatives can all erode value while delivery stays on schedule.

3. Is the project still achievable?

Does the organisation still have the skills, suppliers, dependencies and management attention to finish well? A project that is green today may rely on capacity that other commitments are about to absorb.

4. Is it still the best use of the portfolio’s capital and capacity?

This is the question only a portfolio view can answer. A project can pass the first three tests and still rank below newer opportunities competing for the same money and people.

Green Projects Can Still Consume Scarce Capacity

Every active project draws on a finite pool of capital, skilled people and executive attention. When a portfolio carries too many projects at once, the effects compound:

resources are fragmented across more work than they can support;
capital is spread too thinly to give any project what it needs;
management attention is divided, so decisions slow down;
priorities compete, and teams are pulled between them;
delivery confidence falls across the portfolio, including on the projects that matter most.

A green project is not neutral in this picture. It holds people and funding that could be accelerating something more valuable. Our reading is that some of the most expensive projects in a portfolio are not the ones in trouble, but the ones quietly on track towards outcomes that have lost their importance.

A Better Portfolio Conversation

Most portfolio reviews are built around one question: are we on track? It is necessary, but it tests execution, not choice.

A better conversation adds a second question: should we still be doing this? In practice, that means a portfolio review that looks at each significant project through five lenses:

Lens	What the review asks
Strategic relevance	Does it still serve a current priority?
Expected value	What benefits remain to be realised, and how confident are we?
Capacity	What capital, people and attention will it consume from here?
Alternatives	What else could those resources deliver?
Cost of continuing	What does it cost to finish, compared with the value that remains?

The last lens matters most. The relevant comparison is not what has been spent, but what remains to be spent against what remains to be gained. That forward-looking test is where portfolio governance earns its place, and it is the discipline that connects the choices at the start of a project to the value proven at the end, across the full Decide, Fund, Deliver, Prove journey.

These are the conversations portfolio leaders bring to the PPM Summit Dubai programme at Project Economy Forum, where the people who choose projects and the people who fund them sit in the same room.

Green Is a Status. Value Is the Test.

None of this argues against green. Delivery discipline is hard won, and a project that is on budget and on schedule deserves recognition.

The risk lies in letting a status answer a question it was never designed to answer. Green confirms that a plan is being executed. It cannot confirm that the plan still deserves the organisation’s capital, people and attention. Only a portfolio that keeps asking whether each project should still exist can do that.

Green is a status.
Value is the test.

Frequently asked questions

What is project portfolio management?

The selection, prioritisation and control of an organisation’s projects and programmes in line with its strategy and capacity to deliver: managing projects as one set of investments, not one by one.