Stage 05
Closing
Land the value, hand over cleanly and capture what the organisation learned.
PMBOK view
Formal acceptance, contract closure, lessons learned, archive.
Agile equivalent
Final review, operational handover, retrospective feeding the next initiative.
You are here if…
- Delivery is basically done but the project will not end.
- Nobody has formally accepted anything.
- The team is drifting to new work while support is undefined.
What to do
Get written acceptance
1 weekA short acceptance checklist signed by the sponsor. Without it, the project stays open forever.
Complete the handover matrix
Half a dayEvery deliverable gets a named owner in the receiving organisation, plus support expectations.
Run lessons learned while it still hurts
90 minWithin two weeks of finishing. Publish three things to keep and three to change, with named follow-up.
Release the team properly
30 minSay who did what, in writing, to their line managers. It costs nothing and it matters.
This is the stage where most of my client work starts. Book a free 20-minute consultation — free, no obligation.
Where it usually goes wrong
A long tail of 'just one more small thing'.
Freeze scope, list the remainder as a backlog for the operating team, and close.
Lessons learned are filed and never read.
Convert each lesson into a change to a template or a checklist. Behaviour, not archive.
Templates for this stage
Work with me
Sometimes the fix needs a person, not a template.
I am Tigran Zakarian, a senior project manager with 13 years of end-to-end delivery for clients such as H&M Group, TV4, SEB and Clear Channel. I work on exactly the situations described across this site: rescuing drifting deliveries, setting up governance that people actually use, and facilitating the workshops that unblock decisions.
Projects & programmes
- Interim / rescue project management
- Programme & multi-team delivery ownership
- PMO, governance and steering setup
- Product ownership & backlog clarity
Workshops
- Risk analysis workshops
- Planning and prioritisation sessions
- Decision and stakeholder alignment
- Retrospectives that change something
Talks & training
- Educational talks and keynotes
- Hybrid PMBOK + Agile training
- Kanban / flow ways of working
- Team coaching for new PMs