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Project Recovery: Rescue Delayed and Failing Projects
638 students
Project Recovery: Rescue Delayed and Failing Projects
project recovery | project management | root cause analysis | problem solving | pmbok | crisis management | triz | pmp
Last updated 9/2026
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Separate the symptom from the root cause before committing anyone to a fix
- Frame a failing project with 5W1H, SCQA and a MECE logic tree
- Run root cause analysis with Five Whys and Ishikawa, and confirm the cause is real
- Find where eighty percent of the damage sits with Pareto and Theory of Constraints
- Rebuild scope, work breakdown, schedule, budget and risk register from the current position
- Run a recovery with reduced budget, reduced team and no appetite for new spend
- Handle the conflict that has already formed between the functions involved
- Communicate a recovery to sponsors and to the team so both keep working
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
Explore related topics
Course content
15 sections • 40 lectures • 19h 13m total length
Requirements
- A project in trouble, or the likelihood of inheriting one
- No project management certification required. PMBOK 7 is introduced from the beginning
- Willingness to conclude that the original plan was wrong, which is where recovery starts
- English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- Access to whatever project records still exist, however incomplete
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
The project is four months late. Everyone can tell you what is wrong, and the six answers do not agree. You have been asked to fix it, quickly, with less budget than the original had.
The first mistake is starting to fix anything. You do not yet know what is broken.
Why recovery attempts fail twice
Someone applies more pressure, more status meetings and a compressed schedule. That treats the symptom, and the symptom was never the problem. Two months later the project is later than before, the team is exhausted, and the credibility to ask for anything is gone.
Meanwhile the actual cause — a scope that was never bounded, a dependency nobody owned, an estimate everyone knew was fiction — is still sitting there, undisturbed.
Diagnosis before repair
Thirty-eight lessons. Ten on the troubleshooter's method first, because the diagnosis decides everything after it. Framing a problem with 5W1H and SCQA, MECE logic trees, root cause analysis with Five Whys and Ishikawa, confirming a cause is real rather than plausible, Pareto and Theory of Constraints for finding where the damage concentrates, structured idea generation, TRIZ for contradictions that look unresolvable, group facilitation, and the standard frameworks — SWOT, 7S, Lean, ADKAR, Kotter — with guidance on which fits which case.
Then ten rebuilding the project by PMBOK 7 from wherever it currently stands: business case, stakeholder map, scope boundaries, work breakdown, network diagram, Gantt, three-stage budget, risk register, matrix team structure, control and reporting, and a closure that actually happens.
Recovering under real constraints
Then six on the conditions a recovery actually runs in: staffing a project people know is in trouble, cutting cost without losing the team, closing a capability gap with no budget, deciding who stays, communicating hard news, and restoring a sense of safety afterwards, which takes longer than the crisis did.
Then six on conflict, which by this point has already formed: escalation dynamics, the resolution algorithm, structural causes, political conflict, prevention and mediation.
And six on communication, because a recovery that nobody believes in stalls regardless of the plan — audit, behaviour-focused goals, stakeholder segmentation, channel mix, delivering a slipped deadline, and measuring whether the message landed.
Who is teaching this
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals, and inherited enough late projects there to have learned this the expensive way first.
What is included
Lifetime access to all course materials
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
Udemy Certificate of Completion
Practical assignments and real business cases
A section with additional courses, tools and resources
Do this first
Ask five people on the project, separately, why it is late. Write the five answers side by side. The disagreement between them is the actual starting point, and it is more useful than any of the individual answers. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.
Who this course is for:
- Project managers who have inherited something already late and already over budget
- Delivery leads whose project is slipping and whose status reports have stopped being honest
- Executives sponsoring a project they no longer believe the reporting on
- Consultants brought in specifically to diagnose and rescue
- Programme managers deciding whether to recover a project or close it
- Team leads inside a failing project who can see the cause and cannot get it heard
- Anyone who has been told to fix something without being told what is actually wrong