Finish Strong

Jeff Oltmann has over 25 years of experience developing new products and managing successful programs. His specialties include strategy deployment, project excellence, and program and portfolio management. He is principal consultant at Synergy Professional Services.

  Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   Manufacturing   ProjectsAtWork  

You shouldn’t wait until the end of your project to start thinking about how to close it. Here are seven tips to ensure your projects don’t stumble at the finish line and transition smoothly to ongoing operations or follow-on initiatives.

Project team members are often dog-tired by the time their projects near completion. In their haste to be done with the project as quickly as possible, team members depart prematurely, or don’t fully complete all of the project’s work before moving on. This is very painful for the people who must receive the not-quite-ready deliverables. 

Here are seven tips to help your projects transition smoothly to ongoing operations or follow-on projects. 

1. Manage unresolved tasks or issues. Resolve any issues left open on the project’s issues list.  Close as many as possible before the project ends. Transition the remaining open issues to an operational resource, a different active project, or to someone who can design and test a fix. Make sure every issue has a point person, a due date, and accountability for closure.

2. Transfer knowledge. Deliberately plan how to transfer knowledge to the people who will be responsible for operating or improving what the project created. This builds up the organization’s knowledge banks and reduces startup problems. Knowledge transfer includes completing …

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