The project is huge. It's been running for years. It's late. It's getting later every day. No-one can remember why the project started in the first place. No one is sure why we are still pushing ahead, but the project refuses to die. Money is thrown at it. The project team becomes larger and larger. It becomes harder and harder to get any other projects funded because MegaProject is sucking up all the available money and people. The project has become Too Big To Fail.

We've all seen something like this at one point or another (preferably from a long way away) - a huge project, lumbering on year after year, never delivering anything but consuming every part of the organisation it touches. Everything is diverted into making sure this project doesn't fail. Those on the outside (and many on the inside) wonder why the decision isn't made to kill it off. The original business case has long since evaporated. The project will never deliver the benefits it was supposed to. Why doesn't management pull the pin? The answer is simple - the organisation has fallen prey to the sunk cost fallacy, also known as the gambler's fallacy.

They say that when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. It’s the same in business – when all you have is a project management methodology, everything looks like a project. Most organisations have become very project focused. Everything is a project. New release of software – project. Some process change – project. That’s great. Projects are good. They are certainly better than the ad-hoc approach we had before projects. But projects do have some drawbacks.

To work out what the drawbacks are, we need to look at what a project is. A project is defined (by the PMI who should know) as something that has a defined scope, a defined start and a defined end date.  So projects are finite in length. Anything without an end date isn’t a project, it's business as usual.