There's this project the place I work at, let's call it Project X for short. Everyone who's been on that project ends up leaving the company for one reason or another. I've been on it at one point, was off it, now back on it to some capacity, but my problem here is that no one wants to actually work on it in this small company of 100 people or so.
It's the oldest project in the company. At one point they used it to raise funds. But, with the amount of people who've left and with how far ahead the rest of the industry has moved, I don't see any way that this project will ever be a success.
Talking to upper management you get mixed signals. Some are saying it's important to complete it while others say that they agree, it's old, there are other opportunities for the company to pursue and that we should give it this mythical "ONE LAST GO!" where somehow we finish it all up (despite how in the past 2 years that hasn't happened) and then we'll be good to go. We'll just shelve this project for good and go off to this magical land of Narnia where we work on better projects.
How exactly can this project be turned around when no one wants to actually touch this project, and the longer someone's been at the company the less they want to be involved?
EDIT After reading up on the musings around why no one wants to work on this project and some of my reflections, I wouldn't say there's a single reason but here are some reasons
This project is a big project for the company, but the customer here has EXTREME requirements that are WAY above what this new technology is currently capable of in its current form, makes it feel like no matter how much time you'll ever spend on this project it just wont matter
Lots of technical debt / knowledge loss. Some people have left the company for various reasons who started the project, mostly because they've been at this company for 3 - 4 years and decided let me score some nice FAANG sign on bonuses which leaves those working on it scrambling to figure out what they did
This project, in its inception was cutting edge state of the art, but now its 2 years later and the tech is behind the curve, so why work on something thats not really going to push your career along oh and see point #1, you won't ever satisfy the customer whos now expecting the latest & greatest (After all, Didn't you spend 2 years on this?????)
New projects come along, management thinks that this new project will help the company really pop off, some of those in the upper echelon have actually began to slowly and steadily prepare everyone that this customer we've got might just walk away and we should have the attitude of "whatever, we've got better projects"
Some new managers have gotten hired and they look at this project and boldly state that "This project is about to turn a corner, watch me do it!!!" Only for them to come up w/ideas that have been tried, or technologically impossible due to the nature of nascent tech that needs time to develop, you've got a situation where those on the ground don't have faith in new solutions and just want this project to sunset