Project Janitor: A Modern Field Guide for Recovering Troubled Projects

Some projects do not fail suddenly. They fail slowly, officially, and with everyone still reporting progress. By the time you inherit the work, the schedule is unreliable, the data is managed, the risks are understated, the team is tired, the sponsor is frustrated, and the steering committee wants answers yesterday. Project Janitor: The Field Guide for Project Managers Who Inherit Chaos is a practical recovery guide for project managers, recovery leaders, sponsors, consultants, PMO professionals, and technology leaders who step into troubled projects and need to restore value, trust, control, and honest decision-making. This is not another project management textbook. It is a field guide for recovery under pressure. Inside, you will learn how to diagnose the root cause of a troubled project, stabilize governance, identify hidden failure patterns, calculate decision latency, restore honest reporting, manage executive noise, recover value rather than simply restoring the original plan, and know when to reset, rescope, pause, or stop. Covering waterfall, agile, Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, hybrid, and AI-enabled projects, Project Janitor gives readers a modern recovery framework supported by practical tools, case examples, checklists, dashboards, recovery models, and AI-assisted analysis methods. The book introduces the Project Janitor Recovery Cycle: stabilize, diagnose, decide, recover, and transfer. It also explores decision gates, kill points, value reclamation, sponsor recovery, team trust, psychological safety, vendor recovery, governance maturity, and responsible AI use in project management. AI can accelerate project analysis, but it cannot replace judgment, courage, or accountability. This book shows how to use AI as an analytical copilot while keeping human responsibility at the center of recovery. Project Janitor is for the people asked to clean up the mess without blame, drama, or denial. Because recovery is not about saving appearances. It is about restoring value before time, trust, and control are gone.

Pages: 615, Paperback, Independently published