Kill Review

Your project isn't running. It's surviving.

Every company has one initiative that everyone privately knows should stop - and that nobody can stop, because stopping it means someone eats their own past decision. A Kill Review is a two-hour external stop/continue verdict on that one project: the remaining-spend arithmetic, a one-page rationale, and the three earliest signals that would prove us wrong. Fixed price, set before we start.

Book the Free Call See What You Get

The project nobody mentions anymore

It is not alive because anyone still believes in it. It is alive because the people who could kill it are the people who started it. That is not a character flaw - it is one of the most replicated findings in decision research: escalation of commitment (Staw, 1976; Arkes & Blumer, 1985, as cited in Gino, 2008). The money already spent should be irrelevant to the decision to continue. In practice, it chairs the meeting.

Status reports have quietly shifted from outcomes to activity. The project now reports effort, not results.
The business case is on version four. Each version moves the payoff further out, and nobody has re-approved the total.
Every review that could stop it is chaired by someone who approved it. The verdict is written before the meeting starts.
Privately, everyone agrees. The meeting where someone says it out loud keeps not happening.

Why external, and why paid - honestly

Your team probably already knows the answer. That is precisely the problem: an internal kill call asks someone to eat their own past decision, so it stays unactionable. Here is the research, stated plainly, boundary included: paying for advice makes people significantly more likely to act on it than on identical free advice - it does not make the advice better (Gino, 2008, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 107(2)). You are not paying us to be smarter than your team. You are paying so the verdict finally gets executed.

A paid external verdict is a face-saving mandate. The sponsor never has to say 'I was wrong.' They get to say 'the review came back.'
The verdict is written by someone with no past decision in the room - no budget defended, no promotion attached, no version of the business case with their name on it.
The research boundary, kept on purpose: a paid external verdict is more likely to be acted on than the identical free recommendation from your own team. Not better advice - advice that moves.
Sunk cost is excluded from the arithmetic by construction. We only count what the project will still cost - the one number escalation of commitment trains everyone to look away from.

What we do: documents, arithmetic, verdict

One running initiative, reviewed from the outside. You send the documents the day before; the two hours are for the decision, not the reading. NDA first, and everything is deleted after the engagement.

Document review - the original business case and every later version of it, the current status reports, the budget actuals, the delivery plan. We read what was promised against what is happening. No system access needed.

Remaining-spend arithmetic - not what the project has cost, but what it will still cost if nobody stops it: remaining budget, contracted obligations, and the people it will keep occupying. Sunk spend is left out on purpose - it is the number that should never have been in the room.

The two-hour session - with the sponsor and whoever they want present. We walk the evidence, argue the stop and the continue case both, and put the remaining-spend number next to what the latest business case still promises.

The written verdict - stop or continue, in writing, with a one-page rationale your team can forward, challenge, or act on. Short enough that everyone actually reads it; specific enough that it can be wrong.

Three early signals - the three earliest observable events that would show the verdict was wrong, named before the outcome is known. If we say stop, you know what would prove the project deserved to live. If we say continue, you know what would prove it should have died.

Price, guarantee, first move

The price scales with what is actually at stake - the money not yet burned. No day rate, no phase two.

The Review - 2% of remaining committed spend

Floor 8,500 PLN (about 2,000 EUR), cap 40,000 PLN (about 9,500 EUR). Fixed once quoted, half on start, half after the verdict. The arithmetic both ways: on a project with 1,000,000 PLN left to spend, the review costs 20,000 PLN - and the decision it unblocks is about the other 980,000. The floor applies below 425,000 PLN of remaining spend, the cap above 2,000,000 PLN.

The Guarantee - you judge, not us

If the verdict and its rationale do not give your team a decision they consider actionable, the second half of the fee is waived.

The Free Call - 30 minutes

Bring the project you have been not-discussing. We tell you which documents we would ask for and roughly what the remaining-spend number looks like - whether or not you hire us. If it is not a fit, you will know inside 30 minutes.

What this is not

Where it sits in our offer: Idea Validation (99 PLN) challenges an idea before money is committed. The Kill Review challenges one initiative that already has money committed. The Constraint Density Audit finds the rules that keep producing projects like it.

Not a project audit. We do not grade the code, the vendor, or the team. We answer one question: should this continue?
Not a blame exercise. Starting the project was probably rational on the day it was decided. We review the decision to continue - which, in most companies, nobody has actually made. It has been defaulting.
Not a restructuring. One initiative, one verdict, one page. Nothing else is touched.

Who's asking

Maciej Jankowski

Runs the review

More than fifteen years in software: CRM systems consultant, then full-stack engineer, most recently AI transformation projects at Future Processing. I have sat in the meetings where the zombie project got extended, and in the rarer ones where it got stopped. The Kill Review is new: you would be among its first clients, and the floor price reflects that. The mechanism it stands on is cited above, boundary and all - and every verdict ships with the three signals that would prove it wrong, so you can hold us to it.