Project Closure

Project closure is a written confirmation that all the involved parties approve the completed project or phase. Effectively, they agree that the project has been kept on track and that the expectations of all of its stakeholders have been met.

Closing a project is the last stage of a project, where you take stock, review, and evaluate the project’s success (or failure), report your findings, and debrief with the team.

In this article, you’ll learn how to close projects confidently.

Guideline

Once the project or phase has been finalized and before the celebrations start, you need to formally round things off by moving into the closure process.

Closure refers to completing all tasks and terms that are mentioned as deliverable and outstanding upon the initial drafting of the agreement.

It must be reviewed and approved by the project manager, sponsor, and relevant stakeholders. The document should summarize what the project accomplished and/or produced notable big wins or difficulties and post-project issues or tasks that still need to be addressed.

In other words, Project Closing is the combination of the following when applied to a project:

1. Assurance that all the work has been completed.
2. Assurance that all agreed-upon project management processes have been executed.
3. Formal recognition of the completion of a project — everyone agrees that it is completed.
4. Making sure all the work that needed to be done had been done.
5. Obtaining approval from the project’s sponsor and customer (whether internal or external) for the work completed.
6. Reviewing whether or not all organizational governance processes have been executed.
7. Assessing whether or not the necessary project management processes have been applied.
8. Administrative closing of any and all procurements, reviewing that all work on the contract has been completed and that both parties have completed their contractual obligations toward each other.
9. Formally recognizing the completion of a project and its transition to operations.
10. Validating that the project achieved the benefits identified in the business case.
11. Capturing of lessons learned: What was done well and should be documented to be repeated in the future? What could have been done better? And if so, how could it have been done better?
12. Disbanding project resources, freeing them to perform other projects and undertake other tasks as required within the organization. Use DCM as well to set the end date and reassign team members.
13. Transitioning project deliverables to the customer organization in a manner that warrants seamless operations and support.

Template

If you want to standardize your team’s closing process, consider turning your project closure process into a custom template. The template allows you to create a predefined set of steps that you can duplicate and reuse every time you wrap up a project.

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