4.6 Closing Project or Phase

The Closing Project process concludes all the project processes, work or phases.  It formally ties up and archives the work activities, lessons learned and administrative documents. It also spells out the formal release of project resources, contract close out and final inspections results.  Any applied warranties or product registrations are initiated and also archived.  See figure 47 for the Inputs, Tools & Techniques and Outputs for the Close Project or Phase knowledge area. 

Figure 47. Develop Project Charter: Inputs, Tools & Techniques, and Outputs. Reprinted from "A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide), 5th Edition" by Project Management Institute, 2013, p.100. Copyright 2013 by Project Management Institute, Inc. Reprinted without permission.

 Process Definition

Project Management teams review all the documents, completed deliverables, acceptance inspections results and organize the archival documents, and measure these against the Project Management Plan. This is also where project stakeholder evaluations of the project are obtained, analyzed and archived.

Process Assessment

This process allows the project team to analyze the project's actual results against its planned results; and provide a critical analysis and documentation of how to better achieve or improve on project processes in the future. For projects terminated prior to successfully meeting project goals, this process provides a forum for the project team to review, why and suggest corrective actions. 

Artifacts

Input

The Project Management plan is the initiatory document for the project deliverables and defines the project objectives and scope.  For that purpose it is also an in input for the close Project or Phase.  In order to know if you have accomplished your goals you have to evaluate those goals against the completed deliverables. The Input Artifact I've included is the Project Management Plan from PMGT501.  see 4.6.1 below

Tools & Techniques

The tools and techniques for this process are to use expert judgement, analytical techniques and meetings.  These tools are critical in analyzing and evaluating the quality of the completed deliverables.  Because there were no actual meetings it is hard to provide evidence this artifact; however, during PMGT502 I had to blog on project meetings and have included this as an artifact. see 4.6.2 

Output

In PMGT611 we developed an IT project to reorganize the IT program and push for updated IT project management processes.  The second part of the course requirement was to evaluate the result of our project proposals and how we envisioned the deliverables would impact the University IT programs.  The part 2 product of this course meets, "Final product, service or result transition," Output artifact as listed in figure 47.  see 4.6.3