Is Your Organization Ready for Managing 'Back-End' Projects?

The vast majority of projects deals with their 'front-end,' i.e., the planning and delivery of new assets, goods and services, including building infrastructure, developing new drugs, and coding software. However, more and more projects need to deal with their 'back-ends,' such as decommissioning infrastructure, withdrawing dangerous drugs from the market and eliminating malign software. While the 'front-end' of projects, and organizations involved in projects, has been empirically investigated for millennia (and academically for decades), the 'back-end' of projects is a novel field with extremely limited practical and academic knowledge. The management of 'back-end' projects is peculiar since it lacks traditional project motivations (e.g., usually there is not cash flow at the end of a 'back-end' project), the stakeholders are different (e.g., drug addicts and not patients), and the organizations involved might have very different agendas (e.g., criminal organizations). This article discusses the relevance and peculiarities of "back-end' projects, providing key insights to manage them.