The Money Files

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!

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