The last milestone was passed, the product is ready, the customers are satisfied – ok, that’s the end of the project. The end of the project does not mean the end of the related work in the project. If you want to finish seriously, there are some other steps waiting for you as a project manager or project responsible person. Project closing is a major milestone in the Project Plan.
- Create a list of outstanding items from the project. Zero items are a good sign – missing items must be analyzed and caught up as quickly as possible.
- Prepare a project report for your head, giving a true picture of the complete project. This should cover strengths as well as weaknesses in the project (independent if occurred in your project group or coming from outside).
- Check the financial balance of the project – try to find out where you could have done some tasks by spending less money keeping the same quality level, try to find out amendments to reduce internal costs, and do similar considerations. Take note of your considerations and keep them – you’ll need them later!
- Care for efficient and meaningful feedback on the project.
This should cover (for example) customer feedback, comments about collaboration, the efficiency of communication, conflict solving, and other related issues. The methods to get feedback should fit the issues. In a further posting, we will discuss various feedback methods. - Create a document “Lessons Learned”
At best, manage this task with another person deeply involved in the project. This document should contain a very strict analysis of what was going wrong and what worked properly, the results of your budget considerations, the feedback as a summary as collected from the various impact sources. This document should be kept as an internal paper to help other groups of your company to avoid errors and mistakes. It is an essential document for the further development of staff in the company.
Lessons Learned meeting – a final conclusion of the project!
Comments and experience from former projects
Lessons Learned are essential for further development, but often forgotten or not set to the necessary priority. From the many European Projects (in the frame of LLP of Erasmus+) we found out, that especially in school projects lessons learned analyses are missing (which leads to no further development of the staff). Therefore, lessons learned will be a topic in the future.
_______________________
Further readings: Project Management Institute (Lessons Learned)