Failing Software Development Project: Best Proven Rescue
Software projects rarely fail in a single moment. They drift — a sprint slips, integration is deferred, a status report stays amber for eleven weeks — until the gap between reported progress and real progress can no longer be closed inside the original budget. Most of those projects are still recoverable, and for far less than the cost of starting again. This guide covers the practical rescue: the four failure signatures that separate a struggling project from a genuinely failing one, a ten-day audit that produces defensible numbers instead of percentage-complete fiction, the five root cause families and how to tell which two you have, the four rescue options with UK cost bands, the governance changes that stop a rescued project relapsing, and the three signals that mean you should stop and salvage instead.
