Question

Your company has been working on a software development project for some time now. The project is to develop an enterprise software that would integrate calendar, email, spreadsheet, expense, and portfolio management programs. All signs seem to indicate that the software development project is nearing completion. Major aspects of the software development process have been completed, and it is expected that the software could be ready to ship within four months of the official end of the project. The senior project manager, in consultation with other project managers on the project, has concluded that it was time to start planning termination of the project. Some of the project termination methods being considered include extinction, addition, and integration. Because of your experience in this area, the senior project manager has asked you to provide him with a recommendation on the best project termination method to implement under the circumstances. Recommend one of the three methods of project termination, i.e., extinction, addition, and integration, and discuss the rationale for your recommendation.

Answer 1

Termination by extinction implies simply stopping a project - irrespective of whether it's successful or not. Termination by addition means incorporating the project into your ongoing operations - as a separate unit/department in your company (the project's more or less external, but still a full-fledged addition to the parent company). Termination by integration means that the project's output is integrated with the primary operations of the organisation (at various levels, and among its various existing functions). It becomes a part-and-parcel of the operating-systems of the parent company and is embedded thoroughly in its day-to-day operations.

Given the above descriptions, you should ideally base your judgement on the quality and market potential of your project output and your overall budgets and organisational culture.

So the questions that you need to ask yourself is - What is the market potential of the new software you've developed? What's its utility, demand, usefulness, rarity, sales and profit-potential etc.? Would it be beneficial to incorporate it into your own business?

Let's assume the output scores highly on all thinkable parameters. Then - you've struck gold! The ideal way to terminate would be to internalise all the elements (resources- manpower, machines etc. used on the project) as well as the output of the project into your organisation so that all your operations and functions can also benefit from your innovation. Hence, Termination by integration would be suitable (or even Termination by addition - if you feel the output's utility is restricted only to a certain specific part of your operations or if your budgets are limited and you can apply it to just one aspect of your business). On the contrary, if everything seems dubious about the project output and there's no practical application possible to your systems then you may opt Termination by extinction.