You Don’t Need a Recession to Kill a Zombie Project
By Martin Bergmann | AI Project Lab | September 2026
Every portfolio review has one of these. A project that hasn’t produced a real update or any real value in months, and everyone already knows it. Nobody has canceled it, and nobody has escalated it either. It just gets renewed every month or quarter, because renewing it is easier than being the person who kills it.
I have watched this exact scenario play out more than once, in more than one organization. I am not naming the project or the company; some “zombies” deserve their privacy. You probably already have one in mind…
The uncomfortable part - what happened constraint is good for that.
That is not incompetence. It is the default outcome of a portfolio left alone long enough. What actually kills a project like that is rarely better tracking or a stricter intake process. More often, it is something nobody asked for: a downturn, a budget cut, a hiring freeze.
In 2010, researchers Ranjay Gulati, Nitin Nohria, and Franz Wohlgezogen studied 4,700 public companies across three recessions, tracking performance before, during, and after each one. Roughly 9% came out ahead: not just intact, but beating their own pre-recession numbers and outperforming industry rivals by at least 10% in sales and profit growth in the years that followed.
The winners were not the deepest cost-cutters. Companies that cut fastest and hardest had only a 21% chance of pulling ahead once the recession ended. The boldest investors did not win either, with only a 26% chance. What separated the roughly 9% who thrived was doing both at once: cutting selectively, mostly through operational efficiency, while continuing to invest in the things that actually mattered.
The researchers were not studying individual projects. They were looking at company-level strategy under pressure. But the mechanism scales down cleanly. What a recession does to a company’s budget, a real constraint does to a project portfolio. It does not create better judgment. It grants permission to use the judgment leadership already had but had been avoiding.
That is the uncomfortable part. Most organizations already know which projects are running on inertia. What they lack is not information; it is a reason a sponsor can accept without it appearing to be an admission that the project should never have been approved. Constraint supplies that reason for free.
Where AI actually helps.
A recession is not something you can schedule. But the diagnostic work behind one does not require one.
Point AI at the last three status updates for every active project and ask it to flag the ones that read almost identically to their update from two cycles ago. That is the signature of a stalled project long before any dashboard admits it. Cross-reference against spend: work that is still costing money but has not produced a closed decision or a measurable change in output within weeks is the closest thing to a zombie a portfolio has.
The harder problem is not finding these projects. It is what to say about them. A scoring model can rank a project as low-priority. It cannot make a sponsor feel like canceling it was the right call rather than a loss. That is a narrative problem, not an analytical one, and it is worth asking AI to draft that sentence too: the one that frames the cut as a decision made in view of real constraints, not a verdict on the person who championed it.
You do not need a recession to kill a zombie project. You need a reason good enough for the sponsor to accept.
Martin Bergmann is the Director of an IT PMO and founder of the AI Project Lab. He writes about AI, project management, and the future of intelligent work.
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