A busy professional asked me this question:
How do you announce a project completion?
There are several different definitions of a “project completion”.
Agreeing on definitions
There are several project managements terms that you need to clarify and define before a project starts. Some of those terms are:
- Schedule
- Staff and roles
- Quality level
- Management/Decision hierarchy
- Success Criteria
- Milestones
- Done – Complete
- Triage terms (Critical, High, Medium, Low)
- Priorities
- Recovery Protocols
Because there are many different departments and agendas involved in any one project, each department or organization/team needs to agree to the terms that they are going to use (and abide by) throughout their phase of the project.
Agreement on “Project Completion” meaning
Before beginning the project, you will need to clarify and define what “project completion” means to this particular team or organization.
Does it mean:
- When the project is initially released to GA (general availability)?
- When the project defect/support calls flatten out to single digits a month?
- When the project has had it’s final Lessons Learned/ Post-Mortem?
- When the project received it’s first bonafide sale/client?
- When the development work of the project is completed – but deployment is stalled due to funding, availability, etc?
- When the development staff are completed and move onto another project?
- Or When the product has hit their “success criteria” – which is also defined at the start of the project.
Any definition is totally acceptable, as long as it’s clarified and agreed to by all involved (including internal and external stakeholders).
Life-Span of a Project
Most projects and products have a life-span that far exceeds the development portion or phase.
Projects go through many stages:
- Inception
- Planning
- Execution
- Testing
- Monitoring/Control
- Maintenance, Fixes, Support (often times cyclical until project’s end-of-life)
- Project end-of-life
You should be announcing and reporting each phase, milestone and status on the project until the project’s life-cycle has ended.
Each organization/team needs to define what their “project complete” means as well as their “success criteria” for their individual completion. It is normal for each organization to have a different definition. Development and Test departments will have a different definition than that of the Deployment, Support, Sales, Marketing, etc.
Setting Success Criteria
The success criteria often include number of features released, and number of known defects (triaged into High, Medium, and Low impact). These defects are collected from in-house testing, external Alpha and Beta testing, as well as initial GA releases. Most organizations track/triage the number of incoming defects/complaints to continually schedule maintenance revisions with the goal to get 0 HIGHs reported in a certain time period (as well as low/single digit medium calls).
There will also support and maintenance on a project, long after delivery. This often includes additional releases and bug fixes.
In this way, a project never completes – it just becomes obsolete.
If you need want to discuss in more detail, please setup a one-on-one consult session.
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Written by Laura Rose
Author of the business and time management books: TimePeace: Making peace with time – and The Book of Answers: 105 Career Critical Situations . Laura is a business and efficiency coach that specializes in time management, project management, and work-life balance strategies.