PRINCE2 Project Close – Hand over products and evaluate the project
Once the project is completed and it is ready for PRINCE2 project close, its products must be passed on to those who will operate and maintain the products within their operational life. This must happen before the actual project close
This may happen as a single release at the end of the project, or the project may have been undertaking phased delivery and hence hand products over to the customer during the stages, but what I am referring to here would be the final product or products of the phased delivery.
As part of handing over these products, the Benefits Management Approach may need to be updated to include the resources and timing for post-project benefits reviews (which occur after the project close) tied to the performance of the project products in their operational use.
It is important to understand that it is not the responsibility of the project to carry out such post-project benefit reviews, only to plan for them as part of the project close.
The project manager working with the project management team will prepare follow-on action recommendations to include any uncompleted or unfinished work. These will include any current issues and any outstanding risks which if they were to occur, would do so in the operational life of the end product after project close.
The project manager will want to agree on who is the owner and manage these issues and risks after the project close.
The Change Management Approach document should be checked to confirm how the products are to be handed over to those who will look after them in their operational life once the project close has taken place. This may include ensuring that suitable service agreements or maintenance contracts have been drawn up and in place (it is not normally the responsibility of the project to fund such agreements and contracts).
The operations and maintenance groups need to confirm that they have accepted the products and the project manager should obtain appropriate acceptance records and add them to the project files.
This will then transfer responsibility for the products to those parts of the organization after the project close. If used, don’t forget to update each product’s Configuration Item Record to reflect that their status is now ‘operational’.
An organization needs to learn from their experiences with projects, in particular by capturing what happened, then be used to improve estimates for future projects.
PRINCE2 Project Close – Learn from the experience
One of the seven principles within PRINCE2 is to learn from experience, and the following actions will help us do that:
- Refer to the original Project Initiation Documentation baselines in the initiation stage and against this review he approved changes as defined by its latest version.
- Using input from the project management team, the project manager will prepare an End Project Report.
- This should include an assessment of the results of the project against the expected benefits in the Business Case, how the project performed against its objectives, having seen performed, and a review of the project products at project close.
- Similarly, the project manager will prepare a Lessons Report that may be applied to future projects. This will be sent to corporate or programme management, and it would be a good idea if a copy was sent to your organization’s project office so that these lessons can be embedded back within the organization.
- The Lessons Report should document what went well, what went badly, and any recommendations for the future. The review should be held of any useful measurements such as work effort costs and duration, how quality checking tracked errors or not, and, after the project close, any useful ideas about how to tailor PRINCE2 for similar projects in the future.
When the project manager has confirmed that the project can be closed and has completed their responsibilities within the project close, he or she will send a closure recommendation to the project board.
Here are the actions the project manager should ensure now happens:
- Use the Communication Management Approach to identify which stakeholders or interested parties need to know that we are performing the project close.
- Perform a project close down all of the registers and logs.
- Secure and archive all project information using the Configuration Management Strategy to determine how it should happen, prepare and send a draft project closure notification for review by the project board stating that the project has now been completed.
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