Knowing when to stop
Most projects that should stop, don’t.
By the time one is two years and several million pounds in, it has a momentum of its own. Budgets are committed. Teams are built around it. And the people best placed to see that the plan is now wrong are usually the people who proposed it. Stopping is always available in theory. It is very rarely taken.
Sixteen spent fuel elements at Wylfa had become stuck in dry storage. No conventional grab could retrieve them, and until they were dealt with they remained a live problem on a site the Regulator was watching closely.
Before founding Forward Projects, Steve Wayt was senior project manager at Magnox North, leading a £17.4M programme to develop remote-handling technology capable of releasing them. Two project managers reported to him, each running a major design sub-contract. He set the strategy, held the gates, and ran the stakeholder plan that kept the Regulator’s and the NDA’s expectations properly managed.
Three streams had to move as one: a new remote-handling plant, modifications to the existing fuel route to accept it, and the safety case justifying both. Any of them could sink the other two.
Then, approaching Gate 3, better information arrived. What the team now knew about the condition of the elements pointed to a recovery technique considerably simpler than the one the entire project had been built around.
That is an uncomfortable position. Two years of work, a substantial committed budget, a team who had solved genuinely difficult problems, and a Regulator who had been briefed on the plan throughout. The path of least resistance was to carry on and call it delivery.
Steve put a revised business case to site management recommending the change. They approved it and took it forward to the Regulator and the NDA. The original project was closed before full implementation and the simpler recovery route was adopted, with significant cost and schedule savings against the original baseline.
Gates only work if someone is willing to use them. If you have a project you quietly suspect should be re-examined before the next commitment, that is a much easier conversation to have with someone who wasn’t in the room when it was approved.
Discuss a project like this