Closing a Project

After the planning, executing, and controlling processes of the project, the final process is the closing of the project. At this point, you've fulfilled the goals of the project and it's now complete. In the closing process of the project, you can analyze project performance with concrete data about schedule, cost, and resource utilization. You can also identify lessons learned and save acquired project knowledge.

Analyzing Project Performance

Review your overall project and compare your baseline plan to your actual plan. You can review variances in the schedule, in costs, and in assignment work. Any large variances can help point out problem areas in the project. Some helpful reports for such analysis include the following:

• Project Summary

• Overbudget Tasks

• Top-Level Tasks

• Overbudget Resources

• Milestones

• Earned Value

• Budget

To generate one of these reports, click View, Reports and then double-click Overview or Costs.

Cross-References  

For more information about generating reports, see Chapter 12, "Reporting Project Information."

Recording Lessons Learned

Whether or not you will continue to be involved in this type of project, others are likely to benefit from the experience and knowledge you've gained . At the end of your project, gather your team together and conduct a "postmortem" session, in which you can objectively discuss what went well with the project and what could be improved next time.

It's often helpful to have team members prepare notes in advance. In larger projects, you might find it more practical to conduct a series of meetings with different groups of team members and stakeholders, perhaps those who were responsible for different aspects of the project.

Be sure to have a concrete method for recording the discussion points. After the session, compile the lessons learned report, including solutions to identified problem areas.

Project Management Practices: Administrative Closure

As you complete each major milestone or phase, you've probably been getting formal acceptance of that phase by the sponsor or customer. The sponsor reviews the deliverables and checks that the scope and quality of work are completed satisfactorily and then signs off his or her acceptance of that phase.

When you reach the end of the project, you get your final acceptance and signoff, which at this point should be a formality because the sponsor has been involved and signing off on the interim deliverables all along.

This final project acceptance is part of the administrative closure of the project. Administrative closure also includes analyzing project success and effectiveness, and archiving documents and results. At this point, contracts are closed and budget records are archived. Employees should be evaluated and their skills in your organization's resource pool should be updated to reflect the increase in skills and proficiencies they've gained as a result of working on this project.

A complete set of project records should make up the project archives, and these archives should be readily available for reference for future similar projects.

 

If the project plan is your repository for project- related documents, add your lessons learned report to the closed project. You can embed the document in the plan, create a link to the document, or add it to the document library through Microsoft Office Project Web Access 2003 and Project Server 2003.

Cross-References  

For more information about adding a document to a project, see "Attaching Project Documentation". For information about using the document library, see "Controlling Project Documents".

In addition to archiving the document with the rest of the project historical records, include it with your planning materials for the next project. Be sure to keep your solutions in the forefront so you can continue to improve your project management processes.

Saving Acquired Project Knowledge

Through the planning and tracking of your project, it's likely that you've recorded a mass of valuable information about the following:

• Task durations

• Task and resource costs

• Work metrics (units per hour completed, and the like)

You might want to collect information about planned or actual durations, work, and costs to use as standards for planning future projects.

These durations and work metrics can be included in a project template based on the closing project. Save the project plan as a project template for future use by you or other project managers in your organization who will be working on a similar type of project. In your template, you can remove actuals, resource names , and constraint dates, for example. But the tasks, durations, task dependencies, base calendars, and generic resources can be invaluable in a project template. In addition, any custom solutions you've developed ”such as views, reports, filters, and macros ”can also become a part of your template. Through the efficiencies you built into your project plan, you're laying the groundwork for future efficiencies.