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Jari Worsley
Published on 27 June 2025
Starting and stopping: the key to success
Are you making the best use of the resources available to you? Knowing how, when and why to start and stop initiatives is the key to successfully navigating a large portfolio of initiatives.
Most organisations are managing a range of projects and initiatives all the time. At The Adaptavist Group, we have a diverse portfolio of products, services, and solutions, from extending and maintaining existing products to creating new solutions that address emerging needs.
Over the last 20 years, I've learned that knowing how, when and why to start and stop initiatives is the key to successfully navigating a portfolio of initiatives.
Whether looking through an individual, team or organisational lens, being deliberate about where you spend time and resources is crucial. For example, knowing when a product is complete or should be retired can be challenging. Knowing whether to divert resources to creating new products is hard. Likewise, stopping an initiative can create doubt and even conflict.
Cancelling a project or feature can be seen as an admission of failure, or perhaps there's a reluctance to write off sunk costs. It can seem easier to carry on, but we do so at the risk of wasting time and money. Of course, stopping too soon might also mean missing out on opportunities. These contradictions and uncertainties are at the core of why starting and stopping are crucial decisions to master.
As a rule of thumb, don’t start something unless you know when and why you would stop. This forces you to think about success and failure before you start.
Jari Worsley
General Manager, Upscale, part of The Adaptavist Group
What are the symptoms of not starting/stopping well?
From an individual or team perspective, people can assume that their employment status is aligned with the continued operation of a project or service. If people feel they can't be open, you may miss out on valuable insights into the work they're doing.
In my experience, clarity is the key. Is it clear why you're doing what you're doing? Would an outsider understand your portfolio, its initiatives, and why you're doing them? If not, it may be hard for your teams to comprehend and evaluate too.
Look also for signs of inertia or inefficiency and examine from individual, team, and organisational perspectives. Perhaps there are 'zombie projects' that seem to be plodding on month after month or year after year, hoping to eventually yield results or get to market. Maybe there are 'sacred cows' that don't seem to be put under any real scrutiny or tied to timescales or deliverables. Does everyone know the success criteria and how it fits into the overall strategy?
The impact of directionless projects can usually be felt in the 'vibe' around a team. Are the more entrepreneurial or ambitious people starting to leave? Is there a lack of belief in the direction they're going? Do people still offer suggestions or challenge the status quo?
The risks and threats of not starting and stopping well
If your organisation struggles to manage initiatives, there's a good chance the business is investing money past the point of no return. Beyond the waste this represents, it likely means you're missing out on opportunities or are slow to react to them. Consequently, your teams are doing the wrong things, and your organisation is losing its competitive edge.
When you ask people to do work that isn't productive, successful or doesn't make sense to them, morale and energy is lost. If this isn't corrected, there's a real risk that people stop contributing, deciding it's too hard to make a difference. Perhaps they avoid flagging a concern for fear of making themselves redundant. However, if there's a lack of honesty about what is and isn't working, you can be sure that outcomes suffer.
When you ask people to do work that isn't productive, successful or doesn't make sense to them, morale and energy is lost. If this isn't corrected, there's a real risk that people stop contributing, deciding it's too hard to make a difference.
Jari Worsley
General Manager, Upscale, part of The Adaptavist Group
Starting, evaluating and stopping a transformative habit
With existing initiatives, you can use historical data to predict performance and make decisions. When you start something new you have your forecasts, models and research, but no history. This is often why existing initiatives continue when they probably shouldn't: they are more straightforward to understand and evaluate. In reality, a decision is more a question of probability and risk than false certainty. The challenge lies in establishing the likelihood that we're doing the right things. That's partly about asking the right questions, reviewing the data and listening to the individuals and teams.
Often, just getting into the habit of starting, stopping, and evaluating initiatives has a transformative effect. When you stop initiatives regularly, it becomes more of a 'business as usual' occurrence. It will feel less disruptive, especially if the process is transparent and the decision is communicated and explained. Saying 'no' – or 'no more' – should be seen as creating opportunities for other projects to start or expand.
Starting new initiatives more effectively
How we start significantly shapes the success of an initiative and also determines how able we are to stop if it isn't delivering what is expected or required.
If you start something, you should know how, why, and when to stop it. What are the objectives and success criteria, and how much should you invest to meet them? If you set off with clarity and know how it sits within your overall strategy, the goals can be communicated. You don’t need to have all the answers (and you probably shouldn't) but establishing the initiative with a framework that individuals, teams, and the organisation can refer to creates something we can all measure against.
In my experience, one of the key challenges is being efficient about 'finding out'. We’re in the business of establishing if an idea will be viable. We can build it and find out that way, but that's typically an expensive approach due to the risk of failure. In agile development, we would seek to tackle the most challenging problems first – the unknowns – on the basis that, if we can deliver those, the whole solution is deliverable. In the world of product development, even more crucial is the need to establish that there are customers who will pay for the solution to their problem.
In some organisations, the cost of finding out is often inflated by the default size and shape of a development team. If the standard team is five (or maybe more) people, then the baseline cost is significantly greater than if you could use a team of two to attack the same problem. How big does a team need to be when you're in feasibility mode? The leaner it can be, while addressing the primary areas of risk, the higher your chances of success.
And what are those primary areas of risk?
- Usability (can people use it?)
- Feasibility (can we deliver it?)
- Value (how much will people pay for it?), and;
- Viability (does this work financially for our organisation?)
Choosing between projects
Of course, the challenge of starting and stopping doesn’t just involve looking at initiatives in isolation. We have to look at the whole portfolio and make choices. Not having success criteria makes it difficult to evaluate an in-flight project, and almost impossible to efficiently choose between them. Teams flagging how they 'feel' a project is progressing is okay, but you should encourage them to make their case in a structured way. Sometimes, it might even lead to re-starting a project with different objectives. The process of questioning and comparing goes a long way to delivering better outcomes.
If your organisation routinely holds retrospectives, you'll know that self-reflection is built into the process. However, you need to be able to act upon those reflections during the development process, not just at the end. It's vital to hold retrospectives across the portfolio, too. Without this, we miss the opportunity to optimise how we use our (usually finite) resources.
This higher level perspective is crucial at The Adaptavist Group, as we operate a diverse portfolio of products and services. Taking a comparative view across the business is key to making the right choices to maximise our success and competitive advantage.
Making change a habit is key to improving the organisation's ability to choose the right projects. If your organisation can establish a healthy relationship with change, people will be more comfortable with it. They will also be more likely to contribute and input into the process. Once a more deliberate and evidence-led approach is established, you will find there's greater responsiveness and dynamism. It will be easier to pivot to new opportunities or focus on the most valuable opportunities.
Got thoughts, questions or experiences related to this topic?
I’d love to continue the discussion on LinkedIn.
