The Right Way to close a Project

If your project management is poor, it doesn’t matter how many resources you invest or how many people you employ. You will not succeed.”

—Francis Kasolo, PhD, World Health Organization, Brazzaville, Republic of Congo

Definitely the way Equitorial Guinea behaved today, the 5th of February,  during the semi final match against the BlaCK Stars of Ghana during their AFCON hosting project is definitely not a way to finish a project. This is a failed project, some PMT, project management teams, did not do their work well. Where were the contingency plans, did they do their stakeholder analysis well?

The final stage in the life cycle of a project is the phase out, during which you and your team completes its work,.

If all went as planned, it’s time to celebrate. But if you (more likely) hit some rough spots along the way – say, the project ran past deadline or exceeded the budget – it’s still important to recognise the team’s efforts and accomplishments.

Before the team moves on to other projects, debrief and document the process together so that lessons learned can be shared. it is the time you need to take all the learning you have been picking from the initiation, planning, execution and monitoring & evaluation stage together.

Conduct a post-project evaluation – one last meeting to identify what went well and what went wrong. Make a list of best practices to help future projects go more smoothly. Discuss how to improve the process and avoid problems during the next project. Since people can lose perspective after working so closely together, consider bringing in an outside facilitator to objectively assess the information.

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