Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Chapter 17. Closing a Project

If you’ve ever moved to a new house, you know how additional things to pack seem to appear out of thin air the closer you get to the end. Projects have loose ends to tie up, too. After the project team hands over the last deliverable, the project’s scope is complete, but you still have a few project-management tasks to finish. Getting formal project acceptance from the customer is first and foremost—because the project isn’t done until the customer says it is.

Once the project is accepted, it’s time to write a final report to wrap up the project and document useful information for the future. A project closeout report is like a higher-level version of the status reports and other project-related reports you’ve produced all along. The closeout report summarizes project results, highlighting lessons learned, issues dealt with, and risks that became reality. It should also include a final accounting of schedule and budget—the actual dates and costs and their variances compared with your baseline.

This chapter describes the information you need to gather for closeout reports and which Project reports you can use. It also gives tips on identifying lessons learned without ruffling anyone’s feathers.

The final step is storing project information for future reference, using information storage strategies introduced in Chapter 12. In this chapter, you’ll learn about different destinations for your final project documents.