The Stopped Initiative Review

Key takeaways

• Stopping an initiative is a result of good governance. Writing down why it stopped is what makes the next decision better.
• A review separates money already spent from future spend avoided, and records what is reusable.
• It is a proposal, version 0.5, supplied as a Word template.

The decision this helps make

What did we learn, and what should change? Without a record, a stopped initiative is forgotten and the same weaknesses recur: no owner, no baseline, no stop rule. The review is a short, blameless review completed within a few weeks of the decision.

Best for: any initiative above your materiality threshold that has been stopped, or redesigned after underperforming.

Not for: assigning blame, or reopening the decision.

The eight parts

1. What it set out to do. The intended outcome, owner, baseline if one existed, and the original business case.
2. What it cost. Spent to date, fully loaded; committed and avoidable; committed and not avoidable; future spend avoided; capacity released.
3. What happened. Claimed against measured and realised value, and when the signs first appeared.
4. Why it stopped. Five questions: was the value case weak or never tested; did cost, verification or rework exceed the saving; was there a named owner, baseline and quality floor; did risk drive the decision; was a stop rule written and used.
5. What was learned. About the use case, supplier, data, workflow and the decision process itself.
6. What remains reusable. Data, evaluation sets, integrations, contracts, skills and findings, and where they are kept.
7. What would need to be true to try again. Owner, baseline, quality floor, an evidence plan matched to the autonomy requested, and economics that clear the bar.
8. Actions. Each with an owner and a date.

Counting the savings honestly

Money already spent is not recovered by stopping. The saving from a stop is the future spend avoided, such as an unrenewed licence or released contractors. The template keeps these separate so a stop is not reported as a saving of the whole historical cost. The customer-service agent case shows the same point.

Interpretation. Only future spend avoided counts as the saving from a stop.

An illustrative extract

This extract is invented, and describes no real organisation.

Why it stopped. The value case was never tested: there was no owner, no baseline and no quality floor, and the only support for the claim was a vendor benchmark (E0). No stop rule had been written, so the overdue review was the first trigger. Reusable. The cleaned knowledge base and the test conversations. To try again. A named outcome owner, a baseline, a quality floor, and an evidence plan that matches the autonomy requested.

Limitations

• A review written by the people who ran the initiative can be defensive. Have someone outside the team review it.
• Not every failure has a single cause. The template asks questions rather than forcing one answer.
• It records lessons. It does not make sure they are used. Assign the actions to a named owner and review them at the next portfolio review.

Status: Proposal, version 0.5. Hub proposals stay below 1.0 until they have survived outside challenge. A proposed operating artefact of this publication, not a standard. Change history: 0.5, 8 October 2026, first release.

Download: AI stopped initiative review, version 0.5, 8 October 2026 (.docx). Square brackets mark text to replace.