Managing At Closure

One of your key roles is to build the capacity necessary for organisational growth. This means ensuring the knowledge gained from projects and programmes is harvested and managed and that 'lessons learned' are genuinely learned and serve to inform future actions. This means both publicly celebrating the successes achieved and creating a culture where lessons learned are openly discussed in order to identify and tackle root cause rather than to assign blame.

In the case of unforeseen difficulties causing major changes to time or cost estimates or changes in the external environment it may be that the Board will take the decision that the Business Case for a particular activity no longer stacks up and aligns with strategic objectives in which case it may be necessary to close the Project/Programme ensuring that all possible benefits have been realised and lessons learned. The fact that you are able to take such a decision should be seen as success rather than failure.