Short-term and long-term remedies for runaway projects

What do you do when a software project threatens to become a runaway, spiraling out of control? And then when the smoke clears, what do you do to keep it from happening again? These are fascinating questions. This column is about a research study [1] in which a number of companies in England that had suffered runaway projects were contacted. They were asked, among other things, these two questions. With respect to the first question, here is what the companies said about attempting to recover during a runaway. They tried (in order of decreasing commonality):