Closing Out the Project – Part 2

In Part 1, we started the process of covering some critical questions to ensure all of the project “i’s” are dotted and “t’s” are crossed. The list can be much longer, but I’m choosing to cover 9 basic questions to look at when shutting down your project. We’ve covered the first three – now for Part 2 we’ll cover items four through six highlighted in bold letters below:

• Have all the project objectives been achieved?
• Is the client satisfied with the overall project?
• Have the necessary post-project support agreements been established?
• What were the major concerns with the project?
• What are the key lessons learned from the IT project?
• What would you do differently?
• Do you feel the solution was cost effective?
• When would it be applicable to enhance or update the delivered solution?
• What is your executive leaderships view of the project outcome?

What were the major concerns with the project?

No matter how perfectly a project goes, there are always concerns. You may have been able to mitigate whatever issues came up, but they still happened whether they knocked your project off course or not.

What we want to do here is document what those major issues or risks were. They key questions to ask during this process would be:

• Was the concern anticipated in advance (meaning was it something your team or customer foresaw as an issue or risk and thus you were already looking out for it)?
• Did the concern end up affecting the project adversely in terms of time, money, resources, or progress?
• Did it affect customer satisfaction and if so, in what way?
• How did you react to the concern and was your action the appropriate one in hindsight?
  

What are the key lessons learned from the IT project?

For this activity, it’s most beneficial to sit down with the customer post-deployment and formally discuss and document lessons learned. This is somewhat similar to reviewing the major concerns in the previous question, though this one is best done face-to-face – or by phone – with the customer as their insight will be invaluable…and is critical feedback to have. As I’ve stated before, your customer may have been unhappy with things and you had no idea – and now will be your opportunity to find some of those things out and understand how to better react in the future.

What would you do differently?

Knowing what went right and what went wrong, how the project turned out and how your customer feels about it, now you can look at what you would do differently in the future. There may even be other opportunities with this customer and having a plan for a different course of action on specific issues that arose on the engagement can be an invaluable piece of information going forward.

Re-review the issues and risks faced on the project and asked yourself and your team – did we react appropriately and, if not, what should we have done differently. Chances are, the issues will show up again in another project and you’ll be ahead of the game. If we don’t learn from our mistakes, we are destined to repeat them.

Next

In Part 3 we’ll further discuss these items in terms of the project closeout checklist/review…

• Do you feel the solution was cost effective?
• When would it be applicable to enhance or update the delivered solution?
• What is your executive leaderships view of the project outcome?

Related posts:

1. Closing Out the Project – Part 3
2. Closing Out the Project – Part 1
3. Lessons Learned
4. The Lessons Learned Survey
5. Mistakes matter: post-project reviews