As the project comes to closure, it’s time to look back and enjoy all the successes you’ve experienced on the project. All the memorable learning moments and all of those leadership situations that have allowed you to grow as a project manager. Not! As the project comes to closure, you’ll usually find yourself knee-deep in administrative and signoff tasks not to mention work related to those tedious remaining issues that make the customer very nervous at deployment time.
Your duties as project manager and leaders extraordinaire certainly don’t cease … they actually increase. You’re dealing with lots of things going on at once and you’re also dealing with two separate sets of team members – yours and the customer’s – who are being pulled by their respective organizations to free themselves up for new and exciting projects. They’re working in shutdown mode and it’s difficult to get the productive hours out of them for YOUR project right now. It can take all of your resource management skills just to keep team members engaged.
Customer Issues
- Complete all deliverables
- Install and test deliverables
- Prepare operating manual
- Prepare maintenance manual
- Train customer’s personnel
- Agree on level of follow-up support
- Conduct formal acceptance review with customer
- Verify customer satisfaction
Organizational Issues
- Summarize learnings - communicate to the organization
- Prepare final technical reports
- Evaluate project performance
- Conduct final review with management
- Prepare project historical files and place in archive
Personnel Issues
- Recognize/reward team performance
- Write performance evaluations for project team
- Assist in reassignment of project personnel
Administrative/Other Issues
- Dispose of leftover project material
- Close down temporary site operations
- Submit final invoices
- Forward all final payments
- Close out project charge codes and work orders
Summary
This is merely a generic list. A true project completion checklist would need to be tailored to your specific project and each industry is going to have different things that need to be included in the checklist. And several items are really just follow-up to things that should have been agreed to long ago with the customer, such as “agree on level of follow-up support.” That was likely set in stone during kickoff or project planning sessions.