The Project Completion Piece of Project Management

When a project manager envisions running a project, they imagine all the highs and possible lows that can occur. Essentially, they imagine the positive results of their and the team’s hard work.

Some of these examples include:

-Winning a contract award.

-Establishing the team and kicking off the project

-Developing the timeline and milestones

-All the communication and meetings with the team

-Witnessing the progress and staying on schedule

-Mitigating risks and unknowns that will surely occur

-Delivering on time

-Proposing the following on project and doing it all over again

What is missed in that list is the process of closing out the project to completion. The natural tendency is to deliver the product/service, get an award for the next project, and start over. However, not properly closing out a project may experience negative results for future projects and the project team going forward. If the main project team doesn’t discuss and flow down the lessons learned to the broader team, the realized risks may occur on the next project. If the project team doesn’t document the new, more efficient process plan of producing an item that unplanned budget was utilized for, the follow-on project may not be able to benefit from that time saved.

Realizing the benefits of properly closing out a project and understanding the future impacts will help you when developing your process. Every organization has different requirements when it comes to final documentation and task completion. There can even be a different process depending on the type and size of the project within the same organization.

Closeout processes can be designed by a continuous improvement team holding a Kaizen (a weeklong deep dive of a process with the goal of finding efficiencies), creating a Plan-Do-Check-Act process, or even a simple root cause analysis to clearly define the requirements. These are best created at the organizational level as a template and having the project team tailor to the needs of the specific project.

Examples of tailorable project completion tasks are whether all procurement orders have been paid and closed out. Some projects don’t require purchasing any material or software so this would not require a sign off. Another example is if all production or manufacturing orders have been completed and closed out. Some projects are developing software or creating a service that doesn’t require a production team to build a physical item.

Now that the project manager has the process identified and the critical items tailored to the requirements of the project, they now must develop a plan of completing all outstanding items and conducting lessons learned reviews. Depending on the length of the program, starting the project closeout process can occur as early as 2 months out from the end of the project. For obvious reasons, many of the tasks cannot be closed out until the final items or service has been shipped or agreed upon by the customer. However, the process can be initiated, and all the key teammates will have plenty of advanced notice.

After a month has passed, you’re now 30 days out from your end date. This is a good time to tag up with your key teammates to review any items that have been completed and those that are still outstanding. Developing a game plan to complete these tasks would now occur and depending on the size of the project, weekly tag ups would be beneficial to make sure the outstanding tasks are being followed through.

Now you have shipped the deliverables or provided the service and project end date has passed. To ensure that the lessons learned is fresh in your mind, hold this meeting immediately after the date has passed to review risks, opportunities, future improvements, and potential efficiencies going forward. The longer you wait to discuss the positive and negative outcomes of the project, the less the team will remember. This is also a great opportunity to discuss any remaining outstanding tasks while you have the team’s attention.

Closing out your project ensures that all remaining tasks are completed, and all required documentation and lessons learned items are archived for future reference. Project managers can move around the organization and take over follow on projects on a regular basis. Having a complete set of historical documentation from properly closed projects will assist with the project set up phase, any risk mitigation, and can give examples of how the past project team handled a specific issue if a similar example arises.

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