Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Producing Project Closeout Reports

A project closeout report is like a status report on steroids. It summarizes project results, risks and issues encountered, and lessons learned. It also presents final performance numbers, including schedule and budget performance, and earned value. This section describes what usually goes into a project closeout report and identifies Project reports you can run to obtain the information you need.

Summarizing a Project

Audiences want to know what’s important, and they don’t want to spend time digging. A project closeout report summarizes results for quick and easy reading, as the example in Figure 17-1 illustrates. (Folks with a penchant for detail and too much time on their hands can peruse the entire project archive, if they want.)

Figure 17-1. A closeout report for a small project may be a single page long, like this one. For large projects or those that ran into trouble, you may want to include more detail to answer questions before anyone has a chance to ask.

The closeout report supplements the performance reports described in the next section because it includes an analysis of what happened and a synopsis of the most significant results. These are the main items in a project closeout report:

• Summary. This section is like the Letter to Shareholders that a CEO writes for a company’s annual report; it’s a 30,000-foot view of what the project accomplished ...