Reading the story, there's lots of possible reasons here:<p>1. He was being told something was important, and it simply wasn't. They lied to him to make him feel good. Probably not?<p>2. He was doing something that was important to other people, and those people incorrectly believed they were important. Given that the department was closed, this might go several levels up.<p>3. The approach of the department or group was misaligned. "Misaligned" being a way to say that either (a) it wasn't a very good approach when the full picture was taken into account (the picture from an altitude higher than the department), or (b) it was a good approach, but someone else was able to convince people higher up that it wasn't.<p>4. It was important, and whoever cancelled it didn't realize it. The chickens may eventually come to roost.<p>5. It was an important thing embedded in an unimportant thing. Maybe the department really was ready to be disbanded, dispersed, eliminated. It's likely that the department had many duties. Did someone actually look carefully at each one, and decide where they all should go?<p>6. Someone needed the project (or whatever larger project his project was embedded in), but didn't know it. This is a danger of a proactive project: if the person who gets the value from it isn't asking for the thing, they might not appreciate the value of the thing itself.<p>7. It's a valuable project, but the cost (real or perceived) of carrying it through other organizational change is considered excessive.<p>8. Management was simply too lazy to decide if it was important. Maybe they didn't have the resource leeway to keep it running without a fight, which makes it easier to be lazy.<p>And there's yet more possibilities than that.<p>I'm thinking about this right now, as I'm in the process of tearing down a large amount of my own work. I could believe it's just a sunk cost, a failed investment... but I'm pretty sure it's not. It <i>might</i> be the right choice to throw stuff away. Strategies change. Old theories work themselves out until they don't seem to offer much potential, and then everything based on the old theory is in question. We've never really known what the underlying ROI on anything is, though we're throwing it away so we can make room for other similar things; the organization is trading a known unknown for an unknown unknown. And none of us will really know what the right decision was. If I was making the decision, I wouldn't know either.