. Company’s Project Termination
The Company does not have a unified system for terminating projects. It has a very well established and detailed system for managing the Innovation Funnel, not always followed strictly. A manager reported that is somewhat usual, albeit not at all desired, that a project move from one phase to the other without passing through a gate.
Besides the variability between market segments, the interviews revealed some common criteria the managers use to verify, along with formal criteria that form the gates between the project phases, such as tests protocols, regulatory and freedom to operate analysis.
Managers gave one example for each project type of recent terminated project that best summarizes the area’s policy for project termination. The projects are shown in
Table 1. The managers, during the interviews, also pointed a series of other criteria that are applied to the portfolio that did not shown up in the examined projects. These criteria are analyzed on the next section of this paper.
We will begin with the similarities and try to group them to better understand the relationship between the criteria and the project types. Then, the exceptions and exclusive criteria will be discussed and a scheme for illustrating the case will be drawn.