Pet projects are vanity pieces of work that are still pursued long after they have stopped making commercial or strategic sense.
These time-wasters drain scarce resources and damage team morale. My job is to help people prioritise, but it’s not easy to kill off even deeply distracting vanity projects.
They are often defended by shrewd political operators, or by nice people you don’t want to upset. Like a Deputy Head I was told about who insisted on holding an art exhibition every year just before stressful SATs week.
They might be the baby of a senior person with a prickly ego who is able to shield their ‘transformation’ from too much scrutiny. For example, one highly trumpeted up-skilling initiative that had no measurable impact on skills, but got plenty of attention on LinkedIn.
Ineffective managers initiate pet projects to look busy. Their logic is that if they have enough projects on the go, then surely one of them must land. Their over-stretched colleagues resent being dragged down another rabbit hole.
AI is ripe territory for this because it’s high-status and still poorly understood. Yes, you can create a Customer Service Chatbot. That doesn’t necessarily mean you should use it to replace competent people.
The frustrated delivery team know that the true ROI of a pet project usually gets buried. They’ll be shifted straight onto the next one, with no breathing space for a ‘what went well/even better if’ debrief. I heard about an Accountancy Practice Director who wanted a long-form thought leadership article sent every month to clients. By post. It took Marketing many hours to produce, with heated push-back from already busy fee-earners who didn’t want to contribute to it. Marketing knew that it didn’t generate any leads, but colluded in the cover-up to save their skins.
Then there is the spent cost fallacy. It’s hard to draw the line under something you’ve invested in, despite all the evidence that it’s time to kill off that prestigious infrastructure project. You can’t keep riding a hopeless hobby horse in the hope that the tide will turn in its favour.
(I hope that you are enjoying these metaphors as much as I enjoyed mixing them).
Is it time to hold, not fold?
But what if someone else’s vanity project could turn into tomorrow’s game-changer? Just because you fail to see the value doesn’t mean there isn’t any. Are you being cynical, projecting your own assumptions on a potential winner?
Check out your blind spots before you write it off. Impose more transparent reporting and milestones and see if it meets the metrics. Get more objective opinions.
If it’s your baby that’s being written off as a pet project, then advocate for it more powerfully. Have the courage of your convictions. Would you pursue this if it was your own money? If so, then go all in. Get more sponsors. Shift the focus away from the opportunity cost and sell the excitement of the end result. What time or resources can you trade off from elsewhere to give this your best shot?
I’d love to know about vanity projects you have worked on. Where they really pointless or did they come good in the end?