Are you getting ready to bring a project to close and you're wondering about closing out
the project?
Well, in this video, I'm going to share with you the tried and true techniques you need
to close out your project.
And if you want to become a Project Ninja, stay tuned to the end of this video, where
I'm going to share with you my checklist on why projects fail, something that you definitely
need to know.
Hi, if you're new here, welcome to the best career and project management advice that's
going to come to you every Wednesday.
I've managed countless of projects, and closing out your project is critical to your success.
And in this video, I'm going to share with you the top five tips you need in order to
successfully close out your projects.
Now, if you're excited about this, like this video.
Double check.
The first thing you want to do with project closeout is ensure you satisfied all of the
project goals, you are actually focusing on the scope statement, and that you achieve
that deliverable.
You want to check in with the sponsor, the steering committee, as well as the customer
who is getting that deliverable.
Make it official.
It is really important that you declare not just to your team, but everyone involved that
the project is officially over.
There's a couple of ways you can do this.
One is to do an email blast to all key important stakeholders and anyone that you've communicated
with regarding this project, both within the project team and outside of the project team.
You also want to ensure that you close out to any contracts, anything that is going to
say this project is a close.
And really important is you want to have a project celebration, this is a lovely way
to really close out a project.
It's quite interesting with large scale projects, you put a lot of time, energy, and effort
into it.
And if you just ended it and disbanded everybody, well, guess what?
There's a psychological aspect to it that you feel like, "What happened?
Where is everybody?"
You miss people.
I actually had that happen to me when I worked at an organization.
Amazing project, it was super intense.
And when it was over, I was quite surprised with...
I was actually sad that it was over, even though I was working 24/7.
So that whole project closure is really important, but the celebration is really cool because
it provides psychological closure to everyone who was involved.
Conduct a project review.
Now this is where you're going to do it with your team.
And I call my project reviews after action reviews, or AARs.
And these are really important because what you're really doing here is you're reviewing,
"How did it go with the project?
What went well?
What was planned?
What came to fruition?
What didn't?"
So these are all the key fundamentals that you're going to learn about your project.
So did we do things on cost, time, budget, all of that stuff?
Why do you want to do this?
Because you don't want to reinvent the wheel.
The whole purpose of an AAR and doing a review is to learn from it, get lessons learned,
and to ensure you instill those lessons learned in your next project.
Release resources and close out contracts.
Okay.
Yes, I know we had a project celebration, but that didn't necessarily mean you officially
released people.
You're going to have to take a look at your project.
You're going to have to release the team, but you're going to have to keep a few people
back.
And what I mean by that is your project is not necessarily over, just because you launched
it.
There's still a period of time of observation, and you need a much smaller team in order
to conduct that.
So you have to make that official.
Who's going to be staying on?
Who's not?
You may even want to revamp a little bit of ways of working, because it is a little bit
different when you're overseeing and observing what it is that you implemented.
Now, you're also going to have to close out all contracts.
You may have had some suppliers that were helping you on, and you want to make sure
that they're paid.
You want to make sure that everything is signed off, and that you are happy with the work
that they've done as well.
But I'm assuming you are because you would have checked with them throughout the whole
life cycle of the project.
But again, this is really, really important from a closing out of a project perspective.
Archiving documents.
Okay.
This is probably the least favorite thing people love to do.
However, it is so important.
The reason why it's so important is you want to be able to go to your documents if you
ever need to.
Now in large organizations, there's a lot of things like audits that occur, and you
need to be able to pull up your documents immediately.
You may even have an archiving system within your organization.
So don't skip this step.
No matter how much you hate paperwork, you need to archive properly.
You're going to not only have to archive physical documents, but electronic ones as well.
Don't keep 20,000 copies of things.
If you have 20 versions, keep the last version because that's the one that has everything
in it.
You have to spend time cleaning up.
And I know this gets hard, particularly when another project is on your lap and you're
already going into that and probably working really heavily on that in the beginning.
Archive your stuff.
There's a lot of benefit to it.
And it's also something that organizations and yourself and other project managers can
go to, to build off of, if they ever need to make more continuous improvements to whatever
it is that you initially implemented.
So now that you know each step that it takes for closing the project, it is really important
that you ensure you're successful throughout your project.
And as I said, I have this amazing checklist about why projects fail.
You really need to download this because I'm telling you, it is going to save you so many
problems throughout that life cycle of the project.
Now on that note, thank you so much.
Tell me you, have you closed out projects?
And is there anything else that I missed that maybe you want to add?
Please put it in the link below.
Until the next video, see you later.