When it all kicks off: how to recover a project that's going sideways

The project is on fire. A client is on the phone. Your shoulders are somewhere around your ears and you’re already drafting the apology email in your head.

Stop. Put the email down.

This isn’t specific to websites (my background is in web development teams) — though I say the same thing every time: it’s just a website, no-one is going to die.
It works equally whether the thing that’s broken is a digital product, an AI rollout, or a process that’s just gone spectacularly wrong. When projects go sideways, most people’s instinct is to react. What actually helps is to reset.

Here’s the protocol I use.

1. Don’t relive the past

Whatever got you here is now a fact of the project. Useful for the wash-up later. Useless for the next four hours. You’re where you are — spend your energy on what comes next, not on how you got here.

2. Map the shortest path to done

Not the perfect path. Not the original plan. The route from where you actually are to an outcome everyone can live with. It doesn’t need to be elegant. It just needs to be real.

3. Tell everyone the plan, in plain English

Stakeholders panic in the absence of information. A clear, honest update — even when the news isn’t good — absorbs most of the heat before it reaches the team. Name what you know, what you don’t, and what happens next. Then het your head down and execute.

4. Protect the team while you deliver

In delivery mode, your job is to remove blockers and shield the people doing the work from the noise above them. Let them focus. You take the calls, manage the expectations, absorb the pressure. That’s what this role is for.

5. Run a proper wash-up when it’s over

Not a blame session. A structured look at what the system allowed to happen — the process gaps, the assumptions nobody tested, the handoffs that weren’t clear enough. Skip this step and you’ll be back here.

Worth mentioning: some work genuinely is high stakes. Regulated systems, financial infrastructure, anything where failure has real consequences for real people — in those cases, quality isn’t negotiable and the timeline or budget has to flex. That’s a different conversation. But most of what most of us deliver… It’s not that.

Taking delivery seriously is the job. Letting it consume you isn’t.

The best operators I work with hold both at once: this matters, and I’m not going to panic about it. That’s what keeps your options open when everything around you is narrowing.

There’s almost always a way to get things done. Your job is to stay calm enough to find it.

The shorter 2023 version of this is still here if you want the quick hit.