Finalising human resource activities

Follow organisational procedures to formally disband the project team and prepare for project handover. You will need to identify financial, legal, and contractual obligations which must be met to close the project.

In theory, project documents completed during the planning phase should explain what work is required to do so.

In the planning phase, the project management plan defined deliverables and outcomes, as well as developed the task schedule used to indicate deadlines.

In the monitoring phase, the project manager checks that progress matches expectations.

In closing, which is the last phase, a report specifying project deliverables and outcomes achieved is required to summarise achievements. In other words, did the project team achieve the expected results? If not, why not?

Watch

Watch the YouTube How to close a project by ProjectManager (3:42) to learn what is involved in the project closure.

Project handover

The most important goal when completing a project handover is to make sure that those who take over are in the best position to continue or implement the work of the project.

Complete a project closure report

You should complete a project closure report which describes the procedure for project handover and closure and confirm that the objectives have been met and the deliverables have been achieved.

Once the project closure report has been approved, the project manager can proceed with the actions needed to close the project swiftly.

If a project is not closed properly, the project management team may be inappropriately blamed for matters that occur outside their scope of responsibility.

Project closing tasks could relate to:

• reconciling the project budget. Is there any money left?
• paying outstanding invoices
• reconciling accounts and redirecting funds back into the main business account
• making project documents available to stakeholders
• returning resources according to the terms and conditions of hire agreements
• providing passwords to online databases or computer files to the project sponsor
• removing team access to organisational intranet
• collecting assets used by the team, such as computers
• collecting identification tags for building access
• team acknowledgement and celebration.

During the life of the project, you will have been collecting information from status reports, team meetings and one-on-one sessions with your project team. As a result, you may be aware of issues that have occurred. As part of the project’s closing activities, it is helpful to perform what is commonly referred to as a ‘project post-mortem’ to uncover both positive and negative attributes of the experience.

This can be done by holding a meeting or a focus group. Essentially the questions to be asked are:

• What worked well and why?
• What did not work and why?

The following list includes issues that may have been found during the project life cycle.

• Lack of training
• Lack of resources
• Conflicting priorities
• Unclear processes
• Unrealistic timelines
• Inadequate remuneration for work done
• Failure to manage change and out-of-scope work.

Project post-mortem

The aim of the post-mortem process is continuous improvement, not to place blame. The post-mortem findings can be included in a ‘lessons learned’ report.

Watch

Watch the YouTube How to capture lessons learned at the end of a project by ProjectManager (6:06) about lessons learned from an event with a positive or negative result.