This is a recorded Show & Tell session. Click here to watch all recordings.
Most data professionals treat their projects like children. You spend months building pipelines, refining models, and negotiating with stakeholders. When the project starts to drift, you don’t kill it. You add more features. You ask for two more weeks. You hide behind the work because admitting failure feels like career suicide.
This attachment is a trap. Statistics show 80% to 85% of data projects fail globally. In the enterprise, a project that breathes but never delivers is a zombie. It eats resources, destroys team morale, and burns through executive trust. Staying with a sinking ship doesn’t show loyalty; it shows a lack of judgment.
The real skill isn’t finishing every project you start. It is identifying the losers early and executing a clean exit. This article covers how to audit your portfolio, build for modularity, and turn a technical shutdown into a leadership win.
Resources
Before we begin, here are 3 articles we also mention in this Show & Tell session:
The Three Triggers Of Project Inertia
Projects rarely die from a single technical error. They die because humans are wired to avoid the pain of quitting. Three psychological traps keep failing data projects on life support.
The first is the sunk cost fallacy. You’ve spent 3 million pounds and three years on a migration. You feel that stopping now makes that investment a waste. In reality, the money is gone. Continuing to spend on a broken strategy only increases the total loss.
The second is ego debt. If you were the architect of the original plan, admitting it failed feels like admitting you are a fool. You find workarounds and hacks to prove you were right, even when the business needs you to be wrong and move on.
