Final steps to project success: Project closure
Final steps to project success: Project closure
“Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.” —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Longfellow certainly could nail his endings. As one of America’s greatest poets, he understood that great conclusions give poems sticking power—while lackluster endings can ruin even the best writing. And while Longfellow never did get his project management certification (we’re not sure if that was a thing during the 19th century), he can still teach us a thing or two about closing a project.
Projects, like poems, need great endings. Even if you execute your project plan perfectly, a disorganized conclusion can negate all of your hard work. But when you finish strong, you can ensure that your project has clear takeaways, next steps, and sticking power.
What is Project Closure?
Project closure is the last stage of a project, when you tie up loose ends, communicate your results, and debrief with your team. The project closure phase officially puts an end to your project and provides a concrete plan for next steps—whether that’s transitioning project ownership to another team, starting a new project to improve on your work, or incorporating lessons learned into future projects.
You can tailor your project closure process to fit your team’s needs, but here are some key steps to include:
1. Run Final Tests This first step is most useful for teams focused on launching new products or features. Before you formally end work on your project, run final tests to make sure your final deliverable is stable and still performing as expected. This is important because performance often changes post-launch, especially if your product went live to a large number of customers. Often, it can be hard to predict how a product will run at scale before it’s actually launched.
Aside from running technical tests, you can also monitor customer feedback (especially on your social media channels) to see if users are encountering any glaring product errors. If you encounter any big issues, create a follow-up project to fix them.
2. Wrap Up Loose Ends Next, it’s time to review your project plan and flag incomplete tasks. This helps you tie up loose ends and ensures that you’re not forgetting any critical steps. If you use project management software like Asana, this step is easy because you can see all project tasks in one place—plus their due date, owner, and completion status.
If you forgot something, don’t worry. Take stock of any incomplete tasks and decide whether they’re in your project scope or out of scope. If they’re in scope, make a plan to address those leftover tasks. If they’re out of scope, let stakeholders know and hand off those tasks to the appropriate team.
For example, imagine your development team just finished a website redesign project, and you realize you didn’t complete a task to update banner images on the site. After consulting your project scope statement, you decide that this task is out of scope because your team was primarily focused on infrastructure improvements. Therefore, you pass the leftover task to the design team, who can use the infrastructure you’ve created to update banner images.
3. Complete Administrative Tasks Now that you’ve wrapped up loose ends, it’s time to address the administrative side of your project. While administrative tasks can vary by project, here are some common to-do’s to consider:
- Make sure all project files and assets are in the right place and that stakeholders know where they are.
- Update project documentation, like process documentation, your project budget, and your project schedule. During this process, compare estimates to actual results to see if you were correct. For example, compare estimated vs. actual results for your budget and project timeline.
- Make sure project documents are signed, like any vendor contracts or agreements.
- Close out any contracts for supplies, subcontractors, donors, or similar external stakeholders.
- Wrap up project finances. Make sure your final payments are received or sent, and send your finance team an update with your final budget numbers.
- Make sure team members have been reassigned to different projects.
- Sell or transfer equipment or other project resources to different teams as needed.
4. Notify Your Team About Next Steps Next up, write a note to your team to fill them in on your wrap-up plan. Let them know about next steps—like how you’ll tackle or transfer ownership of any outstanding project deliverables. In addition, tell your team about closing events they should attend, like a retrospective, project post-mortem, or a final meeting with stakeholders. If you want your team to provide feedback during a post-mortem, now is the time to let them know so they can start preparing.
5. Update Stakeholders and Send a Final Report After you’ve connected with your team, it’s time to sync with your stakeholders. This can either be an asynchronous update or an official wrap-up meeting. Regardless of the format, be sure to include the following information:
- A final report, including a summary of what your project accomplished, how it performed compared to the goals you set, and any key successes or failures.
- A list of incomplete items that were in scope, plus how you’ll tackle them.
- A list of incomplete items that were out of scope, with a quick explanation and details of how you’ll follow up with the appropriate team.
- A list of fast-follows you plan to complete as part of your current project or pass off to a different team.
- A request for feedback. Ideally, this can be written feedback in the form of a questionnaire or survey.
6. Hold a Project Post-mortem Meeting Holding a project post-mortem meeting is the best way to capture and review lessons learned during each project. During a post-mortem, team members have the opportunity to provide feedback on what went well, what didn’t go well, and what could be improved for next time.
Here are some tips to consider before you host your next post-mortem:
- Send team members a list of questions to think about at least two days before the post-mortem meeting. These questions can be as simple as: “What went well, what didn’t go well, and what did we learn?” This helps your team structure their thoughts in advance so they can feel prepared and ready to participate.
- During the meeting, share your screen (if you can) and actively take notes to record each person’s feedback. That way, your team can see that their input is valued.
- Give each team member dedicated time to share their feedback during the meeting. That way, you can make sure everyone’s voice is heard.
- Leave time at the end of your meeting to thank team members for their input. And when you distill their feedback into concrete action items (we’ll get to that in the next step), send your team an update to let them know how you’re addressing their concerns.
7. Create a Roadmap for Improvements After you’ve analyzed how your project went, it’s time to look towards the future. At this point, you can use a project roadmap to plan how you’ll improve and iterate on your final deliverable and management processes:
- Consider your final test results from step one and identify any priority issues you want to tackle. For example, if many customers are complaining about slow load times, you could prioritize an initiative to improve site loading speed.
- Compile the feedback
you received from stakeholders and your project team. Look for common themes and highlight any action items you want to address. For example, if team members shared that they didn’t have enough time to complete tasks, you could set an action item to add additional buffer time into future project schedules.
- Create a roadmap to plan how and when you’ll address these action items.
- Ask your team for feedback on your roadmap, and get sign-off from relevant stakeholders.
Creating a roadmap for future improvements ensures that you continue to improve and iterate on your final deliverable and project management processes. Plus, it allows you to officially close your current project, then tackle any enhancements in an entirely new initiative. That way, you can prevent projects from dragging on until the final deliverable is “perfect” (something that’s not really attainable anyway).
8. Celebrate Last but not least, set aside time to celebrate your team’s achievements. Showing appreciation is key to building a strong organizational culture and promoting teamwork in the workplace.
Celebration can come in many forms—like gifts or cards, a thank you message, a team happy hour, or even a free afternoon off work. Consider your team’s dynamic and the preferences of each team member, and pick the option you think everyone will appreciate the most.
Close with Confidence High five—you’ve just successfully closed your project. You’ve checked all the boxes and tied up all the loose ends. Now you can move on to your next initiative with peace of mind, knowing that everything is taken care of and you have a concrete plan for next steps.
If you want to standardize your team’s closing process, consider turning your project closure process into a custom project template. Templates allow you to create a predefined set of steps (like a checklist) that you can duplicate and reuse every time you wrap up a project.
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