It’s often said that projects fail because of bad technology choices, flawed strategies, creeping scope or shifting business priorities. Often though, the real culprit is much simpler — and scarier.
It’s a lack of people.
Or, more specifically, a lack of the right people at the right time.
The Skeleton Crew!
In Stoneseed’s annual Halloween special, let’s look at what happens when projects are staffed too thinly, why organisations fall into the skeleton crew trap, and how Project Management as a Service (PMaaS) helps put flesh back on the bones of IT project delivery.
WHEN MILESTONES BECOME GRAVESTONES
A skeleton crew project may look fine on a Gantt chart or a status slide. Milestones appear mapped, and the timeline seems reasonable, but the reality beneath the surface can be far more fragile. They just don’t always have the muscle to get the job done!
When a project runs on too few people, it has no resilience: There’s no redundancy if someone is pulled away for another priority; There’s no backup when a specialist gets ill or is head-hunted and resigns.
Stoneseed’s IT Project Manager friend Malc has a lovely phrase: “Critical workstreams are too often held together by single points of narrowly avoided failure.”
Here are just four of those single points of failure we’ve helped our clients avoid this year:
- Subject matter experts who are “half-allocated” but, in reality, never truly available.
- Project managers juggling multiple programmes, which some might say is our speciality, but when you have no time to focus it can be fatal.
- Critical dependencies assigned to people outside the core team but who were not up to the job.
- Roadmaps that assume 100% availability from already over-extended staff.
Any of this sound familiar?
It doesn’t take much for these skeletons to rattle apart.
The Clanking Shackled Chains of Overwork
When people are stretched too thinly across multiple projects, the first casualty is focus. Context switching consumes hours, decision-making slows down, and mistakes creep in like fog rolling across a haunted graveyard.
In the cases we’ve seen this year: Burnout soon follows; Developers cut corners; Analysts skip documentation; Testers have been pressured to sign off without sufficient diligence. Projects have limped along, but the strain is tangible in every meeting, every escalated email, every frazzled status update. Rather than managing the project, talent feels shackled to it.
The danger isn’t just missed deadlines. Overworked teams can create brittle solutions that are hard to scale, maintain, or integrate. Skeleton crews don’t just weaken project outcomes — they can weaken an organisation’s long-term delivery capacity.
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The Cost of The Ghost Train Of Shortcuts
When resource planning goes bone-dry, the temptation to take shortcuts grows. Why build a robust testing strategy when “quick spot checks” will do? Why document thoroughly when “we’ll remember later”? Why slow down for stakeholder alignment when “everyone is roughly on the same page”?
In the moment, these shortcuts keep the project moving, but they lay deathtraps in the shape of future problems. In real life, we have seen knowledge gaps emerge when key staff leave, systems behave unpredictably because edge cases weren’t tested (you have to veer off the “happy path”) and projects drift off course because stakeholder alignment was assumed, not verified.
The graveyard of IT delivery is full of projects that looked alive until these hidden weaknesses surfaced and the cost of rework, technical debt, and reputational damage is always higher than the cost of proper staffing and governance upfront. Running a skeleton crew appears lean, until you get the bill — they rarely deliver real savings.
Time For The PMaaS X-Ray!!!!
So how do you break the curse of the skeleton crew?
Every Stoneseed PMaaS engagement starts with us gaining deep understanding of you and your projects, your talent and your challenges. To maintain the bone metaphor, we act like an X-ray: revealing the hidden fractures in resourcing (and, of course, prescribing how to repair them).
With PMaaS, you don’t have to rely solely on your internal pool of project managers or ad hoc resourcing decisions, with Stoneseed, you gain access to:
Flexible capacity: Scale project management resources up or down based on demand. Avoid overburdening internal staff when workloads spike.
Specialist skills: Draw on PMs with expertise in specific methodologies, industries, or technologies instead of stretching generalists too thin.
Objective oversight: Gain transparency into whether your projects are realistically resourced, or whether you’re relying on fragile assumptions.
Predictive resourcing: Use structured governance and reporting to anticipate bottlenecks before they bring delivery to a halt.
By shining a light on where skeleton crews are hiding, Stoneseed’s PMaaS helps organisations proactively strengthen their delivery structures.
Click here for a downloadable PMaaS brochure where you can find out more. Or call 01623 723910 – we don’t bite (Surely, that was another blog – ED).
CONCLUSION – ESCAPING THE SKELETON CREW CURSE
It’s really scary, that since our last Halloween-themed blog, 7 BIG IT Project Halloween Scares (And How IT Project Management as a Service Can Help Vanquish Them!), our PMaaS teams repeatedly report that each of the seven scares listed are still haunting projects. At Stoneseed, we’re still here to help slay them all!
AND we can help you deal with this one too! In fact, putting flesh on the bones of skeleton crews is what Stoneseed’s been doing forever!
This Halloween, stop rattling along with skeleton staff. Stoneseed’s PMaaS brings the bodies (and the brains) your projects need. Ensure your projects are fully staffed, resilient, and ready … {adopts eerie horror movie voice} … for whatever comes next.
