It’s a common problem in enterprise innovation: over time, incomplete projects languish in the pipeline—projects that never cross the finish line, but also never die. These “zombie projects” stay active in a companies pipeline, eating up resources, tying up triage time, and making general nuisances of themselves.
And the more zombie projects you have in your pipeline, the more acceptable it becomes for other projects to stagnate too. Just like the undead in our favorite dystopian dramas, these zombie projects multiply.
However, there is a way to stop the zombie apocalypse and unclog your innovation pipeline. In the summer of 2024, we commissioned a study with Forrester Consulting to discover how our most successful enterprise customers approach innovation—and the findings included a cure to zombie projects.
Radically adopting growth innovation methodologies at every level of the enterprise takes care of this problem. Implementing growth marketing principles drastically changed these organizations’ project kill rate:
- For the first two years, the kill rate triples (in a good way). By identifying underperforming and stagnating projects, the average project cancellation rate jumped from 6% to 20% after two years of using growth innovation practices.
- But by year five, the kill rate is lower than it was at the beginning. By honing the ideation process and better aligning innovation efforts with company strategy, growth innovation enterprises are able to produce more consistently viable ideas. In the Forrester study, the average project kill rate in year five was just 5%—which is even lower than the 6% those companies started with.
Growth innovation practices can help you clear away the zombies from your pipeline and fill your hopper with viable, growth-driving initiatives.
In order to understand how this works, first we need to look at the root causes of the zombie project epidemic.
3 common causes of zombie projects
Just like the zombies in fiction were once healthy humans, every zombie project was once a worthwhile-seeming idea. Various scenarios (and combinations thereof) can result in this problem—let’s get an overview of some of the most common causes.
1. Lack of effective prioritization
Unfortunately, enterprise innovation organizations often lack a clear, comprehensive approach to prioritizing projects. When there’s no such system in place, it’s easy for the pipeline to fall prey to the tyranny of urgency: every project is high-priority to the people actively trying to push it through, and projects without such advocates fall to the wayside.
This default to urgency obscures each individual project’s actual importance to the organization. And that means that instead of projects living or dying based on how they can best contribute toward the company’s objectives, they linger in the pipeline—neither living nor dead—waiting for someone to move them forward. Or as a programming and process manager in the manufacturing industry interviewed in the Forrester study puts it:
“Projects, for example, were never stopped. All projects had a high priority and resulted in complete overload of the organization. It was very ineffective and inefficient.”
2. Tradition trumping data
Sometimes projects stay active far longer than they should simply because they used to be effective. The halo effect can easily make a project’s past success (actual or alleged) outshine the fact that it stopped delivering significant returns a long time ago. And so because the project is “traditionally” successful, it is allowed to continue indefinitely.
This may happen to a project for a variety of reasons—all of which ultimately boil down to a lack of data-driven portfolio management. In the Forrester study, one program manager observed that this vulnerability can result in zombie projects spending ten or more years in the pipeline without actually producing anything of value to the company:
“If you do not do portfolio management well, you could see a project running for 10 years but spits out no new products. Maybe there’s a very strong relationship with a very important big customer. The business rationale in the past has always been to do whatever this customer asks because the margin and growth with this customer was great. But over 10 years, the business reality, competition, and factors have changed. The numbers tell you a different story. The margins have gone down.”
3. The sunk cost fallacy
Some projects are allowed to persist in the pipeline long after they’ve become zombies simply because so much work has already gone into them. The more time and resources the project consumes, the more inclined people become to defend it—even though it’s not generating the requisite results to defend itself.
In the Forrester study, a head of global commercialization in the CPG space discussed how a lack of thorough analytics makes it easy for this fallacy to take root. Before implementing growth innovation principles, their company had an issue with underperforming projects reaching a point in the development lifecycle at which people assumed they couldn’t afford to kill them. This sunk cost fallacy led not only to further wasted resources, but also to failure in the market. The interviewee explains:
“If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. And investing in launching something that you know is going to fail is a crazy thing. But we were doing that in the past. I’m sure we weren’t unique in saying, ‘We’ve done all this work now, shouldn’t we just push on?’ And then you launch it in the market. You probably don’t invest behind it in the way that you wanted, and then it just fails in the market, and you think, ‘What was the point of that?’ We wasted everybody’s time and effort.”
How growth innovation fixes the zombie project problem
The Forrester study surfaced zombie projects as a felt problem in enterprise innovation, but we weren’t surprised to see this. Our consultants have been helping Accolade users address this problem for over a decade now. The problem of ineffective projects gnawing away at productivity and efficiency is endemic to enterprise innovation—but we’ve also seen enterprises effectively put those pesky projects down for good.
They’ve done this by embracing an approach we call growth innovation: an innovation management philosophy that sets growth as the single most important innovation outcome and manages every step of the innovation process accordingly. Growth innovation involves radically committing to three key principles, which we call the growth innovation trifecta:
- Growth: Articulating measurable targets in the innovation strategy and explicitly connecting every innovation activity to at least one of those targets.
- Visibility: Centralizing all innovation management data in one place and giving every stakeholder access to the information they need.
- Orchestration: Making every decision in the context of a portfolio-level growth strategy.
When enterprises commit their innovation practices to these principles, the zombie projects start dropping. It’s difficult for zombie projects to survive in a growth innovation environment, as the methodology has several built-in defenses against them.
1. Company strategy determines innovation priorities
Under growth innovation, business leaders translate the overall company strategy to specific growth objectives for innovation. These growth innovation objectives are then prioritized based on how they contribute to the company’s overall strategy.
Once this is complete, every active innovation project is tied to one or more of these growth innovation objectives. If an innovation project doesn’t support any objectives, it gets the axe. Those projects aren’t helping, and so they aren’t allowed to consume any more resources than they already have.
Still, this doesn’t eliminate all the zombies. Being connected to growth objectives is just one indicator of whether or not a project should continue to live in your pipeline. Even after you’ve eliminated all the objective-irrelevant projects, odds are good that slow-moving, underperforming projects are still lumbering around in your pipeline.
But the next defence addresses this.
2. Every project is assigned objective-backed targets
Most innovation leaders would agree that ineffective, unproductive projects should be shut down. The disagreement comes when trying to define what counts as “ineffective” or “unproductive.” Growth innovation methodology gives the organization a canonical way of evaluating projects on this front by setting specific, objectives-backed targets for every innovation initiative.
Once a project is linked to one or more growth objectives, leaders assign it a set of specific, measurable targets. These targets account for priority level and budget, and include a list of KPIs on which the project will be evaluated.
This makes it much easier to know if a project is progressing effectively or just clogging up the pipeline. If it’s reasonably meeting its targets, it continues. If a project misses its targets, managers can take action to course-correct. But if a project continues to underperform against its targets, that zombie gets put down.
3. Data visibility lets portfolio managers challenge biases
As we discussed above, one of the root causes of zombie projects is tradition (or rather, tradition without data). One way that growth innovation methodology fixes this problem is by pooling the entire organization’s innovation data in a single purpose-built innovation management system (like Accolade). This gives every stakeholder the opportunity to visualize the data they need—including data on how a project has performed against its targets over time.
This is especially true for the successful enterprises interviewed in the Forrester study. Interviewees in the study cited that defaulting to data visibility empowers them and other managers to identify and discontinue underperforming projects. The case for killing projects becomes much easier when the data is plain for all to see.
Or as one interviewee (a program manager in manufacturing) put it:
“If you don’t do such a process [of killing projects], you can burn money on 20% of your portfolio.”
4. Orchestration lets sunk costs go
Under growth innovation, an enterprise regularly reviews the entire portfolio of active innovation projects for alignment with the organization’s priorities. This includes checking each project’s current status against the targets assigned to it, as well as surveying the pipeline for potential snags and setbacks before they become serious issues.
During these calibration reviews, leaders can identify projects that consistently miss their targets. These projects are then evaluated according to the organization’s governance policies—and if they don’t make the grade, they get ejected from the pipeline.
5. Growth innovation keeps the portfolio fresh and agile
When the entire enterprise agrees that growth is the single most important innovation outcome, every facet of the innovation organization tries to find ways to get the most growth out of their available time and resources. This means growth innovation organizations are inherently incentivized to kill lackluster projects in order to free up resources for initiatives that have a better shot at realizing the company’s growth objectives.
This keeps the entire innovation portfolio in a state of continuous refresh. Or, as one interviewee in the Forrester study put it:
“Prior to Accolade, we did not kill projects. We liked to hold onto them forever. Now, we’re starting to see the benefit of ‘fail fast.’ So our kill percentage has gone from around 6% to 13%.”
Another interviewee shared that this practice has benefited their approach to portfolio management overall, enabling the R&D department to be more nimble:
“About 40% of our portfolio right now are projects that were created in the last 12 months. That is a far more agile, reactive, and dynamic portfolio than we ever had in the past.”
6. Growth innovation prevents potential zombies from ever entering the pipeline
Thus far, we’ve discussed ways growth innovation helps enterprises clear the zombie projects out of their pipelines. But what about new ideas? Once the great growth innovation purge is complete, how do you keep zombies from infiltrating the pipeline again?
It turns out that when an enterprise commits to the principles of growth innovation, they see more ideas emerging in alignment with growth objectives from the get-go. Because growth objectives are clear and available to everyone, people tend to submit ideas that are already in support of at least one of those objectives. And since historical innovation data is freely available to stakeholders, innovation leaders and workers alike can mine existing data for insights and opportunities to repeat and build upon past successes.
This means that while growth innovation initially causes a spike in the project kill rate (due to purging ineffective initiatives), the project kill rate actually goes down in the long run. When the organization has a clear understanding of what a successful project looks like, new ideas tend to be on-strategy.
One Forrester interviewee describes the effect thusly:
“When people look very early at the strategic fit, the kill rate goes down. For example, before our new processes, there was also an internal focus on products. Today, we wouldn’t see ideas centered on that focus because we completely changed this internal interest to customer-oriented behavior. Therefore, we now first ask the customer what they’re interested in, and we develop that. We specifically create ideas that fit into that direction. Over time, the kill rate goes down because those ideas [that don’t align with customer interests] don’t show up anymore.”
Transform your enterprise with growth innovation
Growth innovation is an effective way to get zombie projects out of your pipeline and keep them out—but that’s just one of the problems it solves. This innovation management philosophy has fixed other common enterprise innovation maladies, including launch delays, ambiguous innovation reporting, and underresourcing.
Ready to clear the undead out of your pipeline? Our free Ebook "Purging Zombie Projects: How to Conduct a Portfolio Audit" gives you a practical, three-phase approach to identifying, evaluating, and eliminating them for good.
But if you’re already sold on the effects of growth innovation, you should know that all the enterprises whose success Forrester studied use Accolade as their central innovation management software. Accolade integrates with your other systems, centralizing all your innovation data in one tool for stakeholders to view and analyze. When Forrester assessed the effects of Accolade on these businesses, they found an average five-year ROI of 321%.
If you’d like to see how Accolade can help your organization purge zombie projects from your pipeline and manage an agile, dynamic innovation portfolio, we’d love to show you. Schedule an Accolade demo today!