Project Closure: Challenges, Tasks, and Best Practices in Business

This project assignment delves into the critical aspects of project closure within the context of business development. It outlines the main objectives of the closeout phase, including verifying work completion, finalizing procurement, obtaining formal acceptance, completing final performance evaluations, archiving documents, documenting lessons learned, handing off the project to the client, and releasing resources. The assignment identifies key challenges such as project managers rushing to new projects, lack of dedicated resources for the closure phase, absence of transition plans, and the oversight of lessons learned. To address these challenges, the assignment emphasizes the importance of tasks like client acceptance of deliverables, finalizing lessons learned, comprehensive project reporting, updating and archiving documents, and providing necessary training. The project references relevant literature to support its analysis and recommendations.

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Project Closure
Name of Student-
Name of University-
Author’s Note-

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Main objectives of closeout phase
The main objective included in closeout phase are (Zohrehvandi et al., 2017):
1. Checking and conforming that work is as per requirement.
2. Completing the procurement closure
3. Gaining formal acceptance
4. Completing final performance
5. Archiving the documents and records
6. Updating the lessons learnt
7. Handing off the project to the client
8. Releasing all the resources that were involved
Major challenges included in closeout phase
The challenges that are faced in the closeout phase are:
1. Project manager rush to next project: The project managers before completing a project
jumps to another project. This ends up in having incomplete project closure and the deliverables
of the project is not completed on time.
2. There might be accountability in the project: Challenges comes when no resources is
allocated to look after the closure phase of the project (Akinshipe et al., 2019). The project
closeout phase is omitted from the project.

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3. No transition plan: While planning for the project, there is no transition plan included
that is project close plan is not made and there is no fund left for project closeout.
4. Lessons learnt are ignored: The lessons that are learnt from a particular project are not
documented and are not remembered to apply them in the next project. This results in
sanitization of the lessons that are learnt.
Tasks needed to accomplish before closeout
The tasks that are needed to be accomplished before the closeout phase are:
1. Acceptance of the deliverables: It is essential to make sure that the project deliverables
are accepted by the client (Pratt, 2018).
2. Finalizing all the lessons learned: Finalize all the lessons that are learnt in the project.
3. Reporting the project: Project report is to be made detailing all the project plans.
4. Updating and archiving the documents: The documents for the project are to be
archived and are to be kept up to date if any changes occurs.
5. Providing training is needed: Training to handle the new system is to be provided to
the users before closeout.

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References
Akinshipe, O., Aigbavboa, C., Madidimalo, M., & Thwala, W. D. (2019, November). Premature
Project Closure: The Part Played by Clients. In IOP Conference Series: Materials
Science and Engineering (Vol. 640, No. 1, p. 012028). IOP Publishing.
Pratt, M. (2018). Project Closure Document.
Zohrehvandi, S., Khalilzadeh, M., Hajizadeh, M., & Cheraghi, E. (2017). Planning project
closure phase in combined cycle power plant projects. Procedia computer science, 121,
274-281.