Closing out a Project
To close out a project requires a lot of careful steps. Here are the milestones for doing it with excellence.
ANNOUNCE
Tell your own team the project is closing.
BUILD THE ARCHIVE FOR YOUR CUSTOMER
Have a final planning meeting with your customer:
- Summarize the final products you will deliver
- Review the timeline
- Get your customer to sign their agreement
Build your archive of final products for the customer. These are sometimes called “deliverables.”
Deliver those final products to the customer.
Verify the customer received those final products.
Get the customer to sign their final acceptance.
BUILD YOUR ENGINEERING ARCHIVE
Build your archive of final Engineering products for your own company:
- Engineering Documentation
- Actual schedules
- Scope Change Documentation
- Personnel: summary and changes
- Project discussion notes
- Meeting notes
- Issues: tracking documentation
- Validation documation
- Work Orders
- Project Quality documentation
- Project Manufacturing Documentation
- Purchasing & Sourcing Documentation
BUILD YOUR FINANCIAL ARCHIVE
Build your archive of final Financial products for your own company:
Internal Engineering Labor Cost
Internal Material Costs
Verify all submitted Invoices are paid
Close out project Account Numbers
Archive the finalized Budget
Archive the finalized Actuals
BUILD YOUR PERSONNEL ARCHIVE
Reassign your project staff
Finish your performance reviews:
- Your own internal staff members
- Your vendors and suppliers
PERFORM AN AUDIT
Perform a big-picture audit of the entire project:
- Overall Project Peformance Audit
- Evaluation of delivered vs. desired
- Analysis of Proceedures used
- Analysis of Resources used
- Recommendations
- Lessons Learned
With all that, you and your team can learn from what went well. And from what didn’t.
CAPTURE KNOWLEDGE
Extract the key lessons learned.
Recommend the Best Practices.
Publish your Best Practices to a Project Management site.
Originally published on March 23, 2019
Last updated on October 28, 2022
TOPICS: Communication, Contracts, Project Management,