The Money Files

If you didn’t do it at the end of last year, now is definitely the time to acknowledge and celebrate project successes – things you did really well last year as a team. And it doesn’t matter how big they are, every small step in the right direction should be marked if you can!

Why celebrating wins is important

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that when a senior leader recognises the work you’ve done, it has a positive impact on morale and motivation. I can’t be the only one who thinks, “Ooh, I’ll file that email away for my end of year review.” That’s what you want to create: a sense of, “they think I’ve done a good job.”

Not everyone needs to be praised all the time, but celebrating wins also helps reinforce behaviours that are positive and shows that people are watching!

The biggest challenges I hear from project managers is that there isn’t enough time to celebrate success, and they don’t know what’s worth celebrating – is it just project completion? Well, it doesn’t have to be.

Here are some examples of project-related wins:

• Finishing a project (obviously)
• Meeting key milestones
• Signing a contract with a vendor
• Overcoming a major challenge, hurdle or issue
• Taking delivery of part of the equipment required
• Starting the work (good if you are literally breaking ground or clearing out a space – take before and after photos!)

Those are all tangible achievements but there are intangible ones too, such as resolving a problem with creative thinking, innovation, collaboration (especially if you can bring virtual colleagues into this one), and so on.

You can also think of wins that are specific to a particular person, for example, marking their one year anniversary on a project, or starting or completing a relevant training course.

How to do the celebrating

This is another area where people get stuck, because (surprise, surprise) there often isn’t any budget for marking celebrations during the project (and often not a project completion either, to be honest).

If you can, put some budget aside to allow for employee recognition. If that isn’t possible, tap into any employee recognition schemes that exist within the organisation and lean on those. Call out colleagues for recognition within team meetings, send digital cards or simply an email of thanks.

Record the successes

One thing you can do is create a ‘wins report’ which will sit alongside your lessons learned report at the end of a project as a reflection of all the cool stuff you achieved and how that work was acknowledged throughout the project.

If you’re in the kind of organisation where you want to share success stories with clients when you are pitching for work, you could also use your wins report as input to those.

Starting out 2025 with a reflection on what you achieved in 2024 is a good way to generate some momentum for the first few months and help people feel good about coming back to work after the festive break! How are you going to take this idea and bring it into your meetings over the coming weeks?

Is it time for your project to wrap up? Congratulations! In this infographic I share a few tips for closing down your project in a smooth and controlled way.

These are things I’ve learned over time, because I’ve struggled in the past to get people to take responsibility for the stuff that the project has delivered. I’ve realised that a strong closure process and handover to the operational team is crucial if you want to be able to walk away from the project and not end up as the ongoing informal support person for whatever it was that you delivered.

In brief, my top suggestions for the closure process (not so much the handover to live, that’s a whole other topic) are:

• Close off everything on your project schedule by marking it as complete.
• Update the risk log and copy open risks to the closure document.
• Organise a post-project review to talk about how the whole thing went.
• Celebrate! Don’t forget this part 😊

Whare are your top tips for the last stage of a project? Share your ideas for making the project closure process as smooth as possible in the comments below!

Done?

Great! It’s time to wrap up your project neatly. Here are some tips for closing down a project in a smooth and measured way.

1. Update your project schedule

I’ve been guilty of not bothering to mark off the final tasks as complete. Who cares about them anyway? You know they’re done.

Stop right there! You should tidy up your project schedule and make sure everything you completed is marked as complete. If tasks didn’t get finished, and that sometimes happens, you can add them to the closure documentation and the operational team can pick them up in future. This has happened to me multiple times and it’s fine. Just add the outstanding work to the handover paperwork and make sure the receiving team knows what to do. Given timelines for projects, it’s often unrealistic to think that every last activity gets perfectly wrapped up with a bow before it’s time to close the work.

It’s important because someone else might look at those files later and think you didn’t complete work when actually you did.

2. Update the risk log

Have you closed off all your project risks?

Some might need to be passed forward as ongoing risks for the operational team to be aware of. But anything that didn’t happen or where the risk has passed – those ones can get closed off on the log.

Anything that is useful to discuss as part of lessons learned can get carried forward to the next point on the list…

3. Schedule and hold a post-implementation review

Where I work, we call this meeting a PIR or post-implementation review, but you might know it as a post-project review, retrospective or something else.

The point is, you get together after the project and discuss what worked and what didn’t go so well.

You’ve (hopefully) been capturing lessons learned throughout the project – this is an approach I advocate in my book, Customer-Centric Project Management. So doing one last review shouldn’t feel like too much work as it builds on what you have already been doing.

Lessons learned sessions are a regular part of what project managers do, so you probably don’t need me to say more about them.

4. Sort out your project filing

Look through your digital files and make sure they have sensible names and the right stuff is in each one.

Someone else might need to review them later, if they are doing a similar project, so make it easy for your organisation to use the knowledge in your documentation. I think companies are bad at managing organisational knowledge, so don’t make it harder for your colleagues!

I sometimes add a ‘start here’ or ‘readme’ file as a .txt in the main folder navigation menu. The aim is for people to look at that first and I can use the body of the file to explain how the folders are set up.

5. Celebrate!

Whoo hoo! You’ve completed the project. Time to say thanks and celebrate how far you’ve come.

Note: even if you didn’t deliver everything you said you would, even if the project is closed down early, it is still worth celebrating what you achieved. Team morale will be better because you’ve taken the simple, easy step of thanking everyone for their contribution. They’ll go on to future projects feeling better about this one, even if it ended up stalling or being closed down prematurely.

If you did deliver something awesome, as I hope you did, enjoy the feeling of completing a worthwhile project!

Pin for later reading: