Define
Define done
Wrote acceptance criteria describing what would be true at completion, which surfaced that the team held three different understandings of what the project included.
Project Management
Recovering a Stalled Facility Relocation.
An approved, funded relocation eight months in with no completion date, no owner, and a scope that had grown without anyone deciding it should.
Representative Engagement
This is a representative engagement — an illustrative profile showing how this CAMPBELL engagement works, what it produces, and the kind of change it creates. It is composed to demonstrate our methodology and does not describe a specific client or report a specific organization’s results.
The Situation
What Was Actually Happening.
The board had approved a relocation and secured the funding. Eight months later the project had a signed lease, a great deal of activity, and no credible completion date.
Responsibility was shared among three senior staff, none of whom owned it. Each assumed another was tracking the whole. Scope had expanded steadily — a technology refresh, a rebrand, and a new program space had all been folded in without a corresponding change to schedule or budget.
Two dependencies nobody had mapped were now critical: a permit with a long review window, and a board vote that could only happen at a quarterly meeting.
The CAMPBELL Organizational Performance Diagnostic™Dimensions where this engagement found the problem
Strategy & DirectionGovernance & DecisionsPeople & CapacityPrograms / ServicesOperations & ProcessPerformance & DataSustainability & Scale
Our Approach
How We Worked It.
Every CAMPBELL engagement is delivered through the CAMPBELL 6D Method™ — Discover, Define, Design, Deliver, Demonstrate, Drive. Each step below is tagged with the phase it belongs to.
Define
Recover the scope
Separated the original project from what had been added. The technology refresh stayed, the rebrand was deferred to a separate initiative, and the new program space was scoped as a later phase.
Design
Build the work breakdown
Decomposed the project into work packages a named person could complete in one to two weeks, and assigned every package a single accountable owner.
Design
Map dependencies
Built the dependency chain and identified the critical path. The permit and the quarterly board vote drove the realistic completion date, not the volume of remaining work.
Deliver
Set milestones and cadence
Established verifiable milestones every four to six weeks and a biweekly thirty-minute check-in with a fixed agenda and a written decision log.
Deliver
Manage risk actively
Maintained a short risk register with owners, triggers, and planned responses, reviewed at every check-in.
Demonstrate
Close it properly
Confirmed acceptance criteria, handed operational ownership to facilities, and ran a retrospective.
The CAMPBELL Model™Where this engagement sat in our problem-solving framework
ClarifyAssessMapPrioritizeBuildExecuteLinkLearn
Project recovery starts at Clarify rather than Assess. Until the team agreed what “done” meant, no amount of additional activity was going to produce a completion date.
Deliverables
What the Organization Received.
- Acceptance criteria and recovered scope statement
- Work breakdown structure with single-owner assignments
- Dependency map and critical path
- Milestone schedule
- Risk register with owners, triggers, and responses
- Decision log and status cadence
- Change control process
- Closeout confirmation and retrospective
The Outcome
What Changed.
Illustrative of the change this engagement is designed to produce.
A credible completion date
Mapping the critical path produced a date the board could plan against, driven by the permit and the meeting calendar rather than optimism.
Scope growth became visible
A change control process meant additions triggered an explicit conversation about timeline and cost instead of quietly extending the project.
Single ownership ended the drift
Every work package had one accountable person, which removed the shared-ownership gap that had stalled it for eight months.
The project actually closed
Acceptance criteria were confirmed, ownership transferred to operations, and the team held a retrospective rather than letting the work fade.
Free Consultation
Does this sound like your organization?
If you recognised your own situation here, let’s talk about it. A consultation is free, carries no obligation, and starts where every CAMPBELL engagement starts — with finding out what is actually wrong.