Step One - project closure checklist

It is good practice to conduct a formal project closure and complete a checklist to ensure that key tasks have been completed.

The education organisation has formally accepted all outcomes

In stage eight (link to start of stage 8) you should have agreed the implementation phases and the tests and acceptance steps. At the start of phase seven (closure) you should have signed acceptance documents for the model office (phase two); the pilot (phase three); each step in the two roll outs (phases four and five) and each process in phase six. So at the closure stage you simply need to gather these together and sign the checklist.

Operational procedures are in place

The supplier is tasked with documenting the solution so again you should be able to simply tick the checklist to indicate that you have documented procedures for operating the model office; pilot and roll out solutions and the corporate business processes developed in phase six.

In addition, as a result of stages three and four you should have agreed your education organisations records management strategy and if that included developing, publishing and promoting new record keeping procedures then you should check that you have completed those tasks and sign the checklist accordingly.

Handover to operational staff

Your project plan and your agreement with the preferred supplier should indicate when they will formally hand over responsibility for operating the solution to your staff. You need to check that this process has taken place and whether your staff were provided with the toolkits, training and documentation and support that they needed to successfully take over such responsibilities.

At the project closure stage there should not be any outstanding issues and your internal staff should be quite capable of developing new business processes as required and administering the solution.

Documentation and reference material is in place

Again this is covered in the Statement Of Requirements in stage six and should be in the contract. Hence at project closure stage it should simply be a matter of locating where physical or online documentation and reference material is held, checking that it is complete and up to date and signing the checklist.

Further actions/recommendations are documented

In a long term project like a corporate EDRM procurement this is unlikely to be relevant. One possible example would be if a decision was made in phase six to implement two corporate processes and then review at a later stage whether any additional processes should be built on top of the EDRM platform. If this was the case then this future action should be documented and a trigger mechanism agreed.

Disseminate results to relevant people

There are two elements to this task. The first would be to review the project management plans developed in stage two and review the reporting requirements. You would then need to review whether or not the required reports were in fact circulated to all the stakeholders and provided there is evidence that they were you can then sign this off on the checklist.

The second part of the task is that you should complete a report of the project closure process including a completed checklist and circulate that to all the relevant stakeholders.

There are no loose ends

It is clearly important that any loose ends are resolved at this stage. Examples may include contractual matters that are still outstanding. There may be some system facility which the supplier has never been able to provide or some service which was never delivered to the required standard. This is the last opportunity to get the matter resolved.

Alternatively there may still be some internal matters where the project team believe the solution has been delivered as planned but a stakeholder is not satisfied with what they have received. Again, ideally compromises need to be made at this late stage so sign off can be achieved.