Appendix F — Downsizing

when the project survives but shrinks

The introduction assumes a project either carries on or comes to an end
Downsizing is a third case: the project continues, but with significantly less money, fewer people, or both
A 50% cut is not fatal by itself, but enough that “business as usual” is no longer an option
The cut is usually someone else’s decision made on someone else’s timetable (Ho 2009)
The goal is not to close the project or hand it over, but to shrink it without breaking it

F.1 Accept the New Reality

Re-plan around the resources you actually have, not the ones you used to have
Answer two questions:
- What must this project still do to be worth continuing?
- What can it afford to stop doing?
Don’t wait for certainty: “we’ll get through this somehow” is not a plan
- Plan for the cut being permanent, and treat restoration as a bonus
The stages of decline that lead here are covered earlier

A significant cut invalidates the mission statement, which was written for a project you no longer have
Re-derive a minimum viable project from first principles
Large projects accumulate work that does not serve the mission because someone is paid to do it rather than because it is needed (Graeber 2018)
Everything outside that core is now:
- Deferred: shelved with a note explaining what it was and why it was cut
- Delegated: handed to community members who can carry it independently
- Dropped: acknowledged as no longer part of the project
A 50% cut is “do half the things properly, or do everything half as well”
- Choosing the former deliberately greatly improves chances of survival
Write the minimum viable project down on one page:
- Keep: capabilities that must survive, each with a target service level (“monthly release” versus “occasional fixes only”)
- Stop: what is explicitly dropped now
- Owner: who is accountable for each kept item after the cut
- Re-expand trigger: the concrete condition that would bring a cut item back
- Close trigger: the concrete condition under which we stop shrinking and close instead

Cut in an order that protects the project’s ability to recover: scope, then process, then people, then future resources
- In other words, cut in the order things are easiest to reverse, and never cut your ability to recover before you must
First, reduce scope: it is reversible, and it costs no people
Then, simplify process and tooling
- Fewer platforms, fewer active commitments, fewer moving parts
- But beware consolidation that creates new single points of failure
Then, reduce people, as late and as fairly as you can
Last, cut the things that generate future resources
- Final reports, funder relationships, and reputation
- Losing eligibility for the next grant accelerates decline (Wruck 1990)
Every cut must carry a one-line reversal condition (“re-hire the docs contractor if we land the second grant”)
When two cuts are equally reversible, cut the one touching fewer people
Write down each cut and the reason for it so it can be reversed if resources return
- This is the opposite of abrupt closure, where restoration is usually off the table

A funding cut is not a quiet instruction to deliver the same results for less
Renegotiate deliverables and deadlines with sponsors and users
- Talked earlier about how to communicate bad news without making it worse
Answer four questions for each stakeholder (funder, sponsor, users, downstream projects):
1. What we still deliver, and at what level
2. What we no longer deliver, and by when
3. What we ask from them
4. The fallback if we cannot agree

Score each person on three axes:
- Future-need fit
- Skill
- Redundancy
Have a second reviewer check every score
- You are not objective, and you may be the last to see your own blind spots
Firing and Being Fired covers the mechanics of letting people go

The people who remain are not necessarily the lucky ones: they keep the project but inherit more work per person
Survivor guilt is real and common: name it explicitly and make space for it
Don’t “reward” survivors with impossible expectations
- “Thank you for staying, now do two jobs” turns a cut into a slow-motion shutdown
- Restructuring corrodes exactly the trust and loyalty that keep a project alive (Sennett 1998)

The warning signs usually appear before the next cut, not after it
Review these leading indicators on a fixed cadence (monthly, or whenever another cut is announced):
- Most-capable departures
- Collaborator and funder pullback
- Backlog growth
- Lottery/bus factor falling toward one
- Rising per-person load
Declare in advance two or three conditions under which downsizing has failed and the plan switches to deliberate closure:
- “We fall below N active maintainers”
- “Funding halves again”
These conditions are the downsize analogue of the advance directive’s shutdown conditions described in governance

Fill in the one-page minimum viable project template for your project: Keep, Stop, Owner, trigger to revive, trigger to close.
List three things you would defer, delegate, or drop if your funding and/or team was cut in half.

Your project’s funding is being cut by half in three months.