The previous essay in this series broke the Stagnation Tax into three buckets and showed how to estimate each one. The third bucket — zombie projects — was described as politically the most difficult to address. This essay is about why.
The economics of ending a zombie project are straightforward. The project is consuming resources that could go elsewhere. Stopping it frees those resources. The calculation is simple and the answer is obvious.
And yet the project continues.
Not because the people involved are irrational. Not because nobody has noticed. Usually because of something more structural — a set of conditions that make continuing easier than stopping, regardless of what the numbers say.
What a zombie project actually is
A zombie project is not a failed project. That distinction matters.
A failed project ends. Someone makes the call, the team is told, the budget is reallocated, and the organisation moves on. It is uncomfortable, sometimes expensive, but it is finished. A failed project has a date of death.
A zombie project has no such date. It continues to consume — budget allocated each quarter, vendor retainers renewed, team members keeping it technically alive — without producing returns that justify its continued existence. It is not quite alive and not quite dead. It appears on the project list. It has an owner, nominally. It comes up in the quarterly review. Nobody moves it to done and nobody moves it to stopped.
The CRM implementation that has been in progress for fourteen months. The market expansion that made sense two years ago when the conditions were different. The service line that a few people are still maintaining because the decision to wind it down was deferred once, and then again, and the moment for that conversation has never quite arrived.
These are not edge cases. ClearPoint Strategy, analysing more than 20,000 strategic plans, found that professional services firms complete just 9.05% of their strategic initiatives. PMI research found that 60% of projects are not aligned to the current organisational strategy at all — not failed initiatives, but initiatives that outlived the conditions that made them relevant, still running because nobody has made the decision to stop them.
Why they persist
The honest answer is that ending a zombie project requires someone to say something that most organisations make very difficult to say.
It requires admitting that the original decision was wrong, or that the conditions have changed enough that continuing no longer makes sense. In most organisations, both of those statements carry a cost. The person who commissioned the project does not want to acknowledge the error. The people working on it do not want to lose the budget or the mandate. The leader who should call it does not want to be seen as indecisive for having started it, or as wasteful for having let it run this long.
So the project continues. Not because anyone believes it will produce the returns it was supposed to produce. Because stopping it is harder than continuing it.
This dynamic compounds over time. The longer a zombie project runs, the harder it becomes to stop — because stopping it now means acknowledging not just the original error, but every subsequent decision to continue. The sunk cost deepens. The conversation becomes more loaded. The moment to have it recedes further.
Meanwhile the project keeps consuming.
There is a second mechanism that is less visible but equally important. Every zombie project teaches the organisation something about how change works here. The team members who were asked to commit to the initiative, who reorganised their work around it, who are now watching it drift — they are learning. They are learning that commitments made by leadership do not always hold. That initiatives start with energy and fade without resolution. That the next time a new initiative is announced, the appropriate response is to wait and see whether it is real before investing too much of themselves in it.
Gartner research shows that employee willingness to support change fell from 74% in 2016 to 38% in 2022. The cause was not that people became more resistant to change in principle. It was that the average employee experienced ten planned enterprise changes in 2022, most of which did not complete. Zombie projects are not a passive cost. They are actively depleting the capacity the next real initiative will need. Every project that starts and fades without resolution makes the one after it harder to land.
What ending them actually requires
Ending a zombie project is not primarily a project management problem. It is a leadership problem.
The mechanics are simple. Remove the budget. Reassign the team. Close the vendor contract. Archive the documentation. None of that is technically difficult. What is difficult is the conversation that has to happen before any of it can happen — the one where someone says clearly and without excessive qualification that this project is not going to produce what it was supposed to produce, that continuing is not in the organisation’s interest, and that the decision to stop is being made now.
That conversation requires three things that most organisations underinvest in.
The first is a clear current picture of what the project is actually producing. Not what it was supposed to produce when it was commissioned, and not what it might produce eventually if conditions improve. What it is producing now, relative to what it is consuming now. Most zombie projects survive because this comparison is never made explicitly. The project continues to be discussed in terms of its original rationale rather than its current reality. A leader who insists on the current reality — who asks what this has produced in the last quarter, what it will produce in the next one, and what we would do with this budget if we started fresh today — is doing the diagnostic work that makes the decision possible.
The second is the willingness to separate the decision to stop from the decision that started it. Stopping a zombie project does not require concluding that the original decision was bad. Conditions change. What made sense eighteen months ago may not make sense today. A leader who can frame the stopping decision as a response to current reality rather than a verdict on past judgment removes some of the political difficulty — both for the person who commissioned the project and for themselves. The original decision and the stopping decision can both be right given the information available at the time.
The third is following through visibly. The organisation is watching. If a zombie project is stopped and the resources are immediately redeployed — clearly, specifically, in a way the team can see — the stopping becomes evidence that decisions are real and that change actually happens here. If the stopping is quiet, ambiguous, or followed by the budget disappearing without explanation, the lesson the team takes is the same one they took when the project started to drift: committing to ending something and focusing elsewhere does not feel safe here.
The test
There is a straightforward diagnostic for identifying zombie projects in your organisation.
For each initiative currently running, ask three questions. First: what has this produced in the last 90 days that justifies its continued existence? Second: if we had to justify starting this project today, with what we know now, would we? Third: what would we do with this budget, this team capacity, and this leadership attention if this project did not exist?
The projects that cannot answer the first question, and that would not survive the second, and where the third question produces an immediately better answer — those are the zombies.
Killing them is not failure. It is resource allocation. The budget, the attention, and the organisational willingness being consumed by a project that is not going to produce returns can be redeployed to something that will.
The cost of not making that decision is paid every quarter the project continues. And it is paid twice — once in the direct consumption, and once in the capacity for the next real initiative that quietly disappears.
Zombie projects do not die on their own. Someone has to end them.