Project Closure

What is Project Closure? It’s actually not just simple ‘closure’, it may feel like that’s what you’d like to do at the end of a project but controlled closure and post delivery beenfits monitoring is critical to ensure:

• Full realisation of outcomes and associated business benefits.
• Review of original Return on Investment (ROI) accuracy and feedback.
• Feedback into the project process.
  

4-Steps of Project Closure

 I’ve broken Project Closure into 4 steps, for small projects steps 1 and 3 could be merged. 

Confirm project is complete

How you perform this step will depend on project size, change/impact, size of project team and how the original project scope was documented (Charter/e-mail).

The following should be covered/confirmed:

• Charter/Original Scope: Confirm deliverables and definition of done have been substantially completed (also described as ‘Minimum Viable Product).
• Outstanding actions: Have been addressed via a departmentally owned action plan with target dates for follow-up.
• Project Sponsor/Owner: Agree project closed and monitoring to start

Closure may be a call with the project Sponsor/Owner, a short e-mail, or for more complex and larger projects a team closure meeting.

If performed as a team meeting then have the work stream leads present on completion of their area’s 'Definition of Done'.

Wrap up admin and finances

Close everything formally so there are no loose ends: 

Retrospective

Project Retrospectives take many forms, all with the aim of providing improvement feedback into a process.

Retrospectives are never personal and should always include both positives and improvements.

Look out for a future post where I discuss Retrospective methods and tools in more detail!

Benefits monitoring

Projects deliver a change, which is a specific business benefit(s) over a defined period of time. The benefits are set out at the start of the project, and form part of the ROI/project approval; what will this project deliver for the business?

In larger organisations a PMO may monitor and report on the realisation of benefits. In small - medium businesses this could be the department owning the change or the PM.

There will be a future blog focussed on benefits realisation and reporting, however monitoring and reporting require the following to be documented in the Charter:

• Clear quantifiable benefit of project
• Expected realisation period
• Responsibility for measurement

The frequency of benefit measurement reporting during the realisation period is agreed with the Sponsor on project closure.

Closure - a summary

In short, project closure consists of:

Closure = finish and tidy up

Benefits monitoring = check the implemented change is delivering the predicted improvements