You’ve seen it before. Maybe too many times.

The kickoff goes great. Everyone’s energized. People show up to meetings on time. Someone builds a roadmap that looks like it belongs in a TED Talk. Leadership gives the thumbs-up and everyone has SWAG sporting this cool new project you’re on. Week one feels like a win

Then the wheels start wobbling.

Suddenly, meetings get rescheduled or just cancelled. The backlog turns into a dumping ground where anyone and everyone is throwing garbage into. Priorities shift without warning or with a shred of rationale. The team gets quiet. The project starts drifting towards the edge. It’s not failing outright, just slowly bleeding momentum until no one wants to look at the dashboard anymore.

Sound familiar?

You're not alone. Most projects don’t fail at the start. They fail in the middle. Here's why and what to do about it.

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1. Planning Is Treated Like a Ceremony

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You planned. Great. But did you build a process for re-planning?

Most teams treat planning like a one-and-done event. A myth that doesn’t exist even in the predictive methodologies. You hold the kickoff, review the Gantt chart, and think you're set. But reality never sticks to the plan. And when things shift, there’s no operational loop to respond.

No rolling forecast. No scenario planning. No structured way to recalibrate.

So, what happens? Everyone improvises. Momentum tanks. Projects stall. Everyone buys the “dumpster on fire” desk ornament.

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2. No One Knows Who’s Actually in Charge

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After kickoff, governance disappears.

Decision-making authority isn’t clear. PMs turn into glorified schedulers/punching bags. Sponsors think they’re done because they approved the charter. Meanwhile, key decisions either get made in silos or not at all. Don’t feel bad, I’ve seen large, well established companies suffer from this. Sadly, a lot of times they are the in the worst shape.

Without role clarity and escalation paths, everything becomes a guessing game.

In case you didn’t know, guessing doesn’t scale.

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3. Stakeholders Vanish

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You had them in the room. Once.

Then they disappeared.

Without an engagement model that keeps stakeholders involved throughout the project lifecycle — not just at kickoff and go-live — you’re flying blind. Feedback comes too late or not at all. This is a huge contributor to delaying go-lives. “I didn’t know this was happening” is a common phrase at this point.

You’re “delivering value” to people who haven’t spoken to the team in six weeks.

That’s how you end up with misaligned outcomes and rework you didn’t budget for.

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4. Communication Goes Tactical (and Useless)

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Kickoff decks had vision. Now updates sound like this:

“We’re at 68% on Task 34 and waiting on feedback from Susan.” I promise you that no one cares about that update and only Susan, the responsible stakeholder and maybe the PM know what this means.

That’s not strategy, that’s noise. Leave that type of mundane update to an information radiator for those who are interested.

When communication drops from strategic to purely tactical, the team loses the big picture. People forget why they’re doing the work. Leaders stop paying attention. And eventually, everything becomes just another task list.

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5. Risk Management Is Just a Slide Deck

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You identified the risks. Put them in a RAID log. Checked the PMBOK box.

Then forgot about them.

Here’s the reality: most teams don’t monitor risks. They log them and move on. So, when risks become real issues, no one’s ready. There’s no mitigation, no response, no plan. Just scrambling.

If your risk plan isn’t part of your weekly rhythm, it’s just theater. Might as well delete the whole thing and save the storage space.

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6. People Burn Out — Quietly

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You didn’t plan for bandwidth. You assumed people had 40% of their time free. You stacked workstreams like Tetris.

But humans don’t work like that. You can’t perform at 100%, 100% of the time.

So, people push through the first few weeks. Then they start disengaging. Deadlines slip. Work quality drops. Team morale tanks. Everyone is out on PTO the same 2 weeks because the project is drowning them.  And suddenly your “strong start” is dragging dead weight to the finish line.

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So What’s the Fix?

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Here’s how we fix this for clients — and how you can start fixing it yourself:

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The 3-Phase Control Loop

1. Kickoff With Contingencies
   • Build in scenario branches. A reason why I strongly recommend a great PMIS tool. i.e. MS Project.
   • Define authority models early, stick to them and update as necessary.
   • Pressure-test assumptions, not just schedules.
2. Execution Rhythm
   • Re-plan (or “Revise” the plan if “Re-Plan” sounds too scary) in a regular agreed upon schedule.
     • The first plan agreed upon will never work. You need to be proactive in reassessing the efficacy of the plan and making adjustment based on the available information. If that hurts your predictive approach, log a change.
   • Hold structured risk reviews. Review the RAID log regularly and then do a deep dive an relevant risks. Mitigation plans may change, impact to budget, timeline, scope and/or quality could have changed from the original raising of said risk.
     • This Risk deep dives don’t have to be weekly, it could be monthly, as deemed necessary. Whatever works for your team.
   • Maintain team-level and sponsor-level comms (not just one-size-fits-all status updates). Tailor the comms to the audience.
3. Governance Sync
   • Enforce decision-making structures. Keep these decision makers engaged with relevant information regularly.
   • Track stakeholder engagement like a KPI. What is the meeting attendance like?  Do you do surveys? There are a lot of ways to track this in a meaningful way.
   • Escalate early. Escalate often. This will keep those who need to be involved, involved. It doesn’t need to be a formal weekly escalation process with a lot of overhead, documentation, and pure bureaucracy. Just keep Jim informed and let him know there is something that needs his attention. the communication method could be well established (email, a slack) for the entire team or specific to “Jim”.

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Our Take

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Projects don’t fall apart because people are bad at their jobs. They fall apart because no one’s managing the middle.

The kickoff is just noise if you can’t sustain momentum. And you can’t sustain momentum without structure. Not bureaucracy, just disciplined rhythm.

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