The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - How to Close a Project Well | PPP #35

Episode Date: June 28, 2020

Part 5 and the final in the series, where I walk the listener through the parallels between the seven Closing tasks from the PMP exam and the work Emergency Managers and Incident Management Teams do daily.

Please silence your cell phones, hold all sidebar conversations to a minimum, and we will get started with people process progress in 3, 2, 1. Hey everybody, we made it to people process progress 35, PMP equivalents, closing tasks performed by emergency and incident managers, fifth in the series of five. Remember, we started with initiating in 31, planning in 32, execution in 33, monitoring and controlling in 34. Now we're going to talk about closing everything up, handing it off, and do so in the realm of the PMP exam tasks, which there's seven in closing, only 7% of the exam. Remember, that's the exam. I'm going to touch on real life because that's what we do.

And then talk about what emergency and incident managers do for closing things out, right? Because there's value in knowing the equivalent of what you do in your field, say, whether it's project management or if you're in the emergency incident management fields and how you cross map these skills. So I hope I've done that over the past four episodes. Do that in this episode. Probably keep doing that because that's what I did, right? I was in emergency management, I was a planning section chief, use a lot of these skills already, map them to kind of the official air quote project management professional or PMI standards. So that's what this very brief

outline is. Again, I'll post the actual outline on the peopleprocessprogress.com website. Give us a visit over there. Subscribe. Rate, review the show on whatever platform you're listening on. Again, I'll post links to these on LinkedIn, on the People Process Progress Facebook page. Let me know directly, peopleprocessprogress at gmail.com if you have any questions. Or hit me up on LinkedIn, Kevin Pinnell. So let's talk about closing.

We have kicked this thing off. We've initiated it. We've put a ton of planning work in. We have built things, moved things, work flowed things and executing. We, during that time, monitored and controlled things as needed. Now it's time to wrap this up, right?

True projects are not forever things. They are a finite amount of time and they are unique, right? That's part of the definition of a project. There's a finite amount of time, and they are unique. That's part of the definition of a project. There's a little more in there, but that's what I'm talking about in closing. At some point, it has to close, just like at some point, a response has to close.

Now, some of that goes on forever in the emergency management world, probably more so, when they stay open for reimbursement and tracking costs and all that kind of stuff, but at some point, it has to end. So let's look at this first task in closing, which is, again, 7% of the current PMP exam through the end of 2020. It's to obtain final acceptance of the deliverables. So we've executed, we monitored how we did those deliverables, we kept folks on track and in scope. Now what we

need to do is get sign-off. So we have gotten things tested. We've gotten our testers and QA folks to sign off. We need to get our business owners, stakeholders, sponsors to say, yep, that's what we wanted. That's what we intended. And in emergency and incident management, we get tacit approval of objectives and plans, right? Not at the end, at the beginning, but similar. So we need to have that approval to say, okay, yep, this is for maybe the last plan of the operational cycle where we're going to get ready to do demobilization and have that plan, which means we're going to plan on how to get all the people and stuff out of

there and shut the facilities down. And we need to get approval for that. So everyone's on the same page. And again, operations is one that's going to help work with logistics and finance and everybody else to get their people out of there safely. We'll get all the stuff out of there. So all those approvals go up and down the chain of command, just like a project is going to have deliverables signed off from the business owners, from the key stakeholders, and from the sponsor for sure. Task two in closing, we're going to transfer ownership of these deliverables to someone else, to the stakeholder. So largely, if we have done a project, if I help support a project and manage it, we do all the project work.

And before we're done, like in executing, we're planning ahead, right? But technically, it's in closing. We are going to establish how we're going to hand the project work on that was done by folks we specially requested for this focus to now be supported operationally through a service desk or an ongoing solution owner or something like that, because we're all going away. The project people are all going away. Just like emergency and incident management folks, those emergency support function folks that have been in the Emergency Operations Center with us through this whole, these last series, right, are not going to stay there forever. They have day jobs. They're going back to finance or the health department or back out

on shifts as police and fire. But what we need to do is do those briefings, right? So we talked about some of this for lessons learned. So part of the transfer of ownership, if someone was sitting in the logistics emergency support function seven in the emergency operations center, and they were an environmental health person in the health department, Well, now they're going back to do that. So what they need to do is have that conversation with the emergency manager or whomever they're handing off to that's going to take that over or demobilize it completely maybe and just say, hey, here's how we left this. Who do I need to give these receipts to or things? Maybe it's back to the localities finance and work through all that. And then of course, have a closeout meeting for the incident or event. So have that lessons learned grab kind

of there, but also just kind of summarize everything, you know, here's what we did, here's how much we spent, if you've been tracking that burn rate, just all those kind of things where you transfer ownership and go back to kind of particularly for emergency operation centers, we're not in EOC support the whole county from their mode. We're back to people are calling 911 and we're responding regularly. Test three, financial, legal, and admin closures, right? So we gotta do that.

We gotta make sure we close the books on the money. We have any legal sign-off that needs to be done. We get all the paperwork done. That's huge. Direct translation to the documentation unit for incident management teams, emergency managers, they could stand up a doc unit in there too, if you have that incident command system, emergency support function, interface type setup, or maybe they do that. So in working with finance

and administration to create documentation packets and boxes and files, and particularly, so if you're in an incident management team, you've gone somewhere to help somewhere else, or gone somewhere else to help someone else or another locality or community. You're not going to keep all that paperwork. It's their incident. Everything starts and ends locally. And then if locally you can't handle it, it goes to the state, to the feds. So you're going to leave all that documentation for them to then reference in the future to use for grants, to use for whatever.

So make sure you have a good filing system, you have any sign-off you need, and we're going to do that just like we would for a project where we'd get our finance folks to sign off and we would, as project managers, say, yep, we've spent all the money, there's no more expenditures that I know of that should come out during closing, we're good, so they can close out maybe that cost code or something like that. Task four, we're going to prepare that final project report. So we've been doing reports, right? Regular report outs, weekly, monthly, steering committee meetings, all that kind of stuff. But we want to have kind of a whole closeout. And we should have discovered this in the communications plan that we put together, communications management plan. And we want to,

you know, convey what we did. Here's what we did. Here's what worked well. Who are the issues we managed? Who are key decisions? And not necessarily a huge comprehensive copy of all the systems you already track all that stuff in maybe, but a good summary, I would say, project report that gives almost like a closing version of a charter, right? It's not a full project management plan, but it's enough to let people know what was accomplished. I think it's a good way to look at that. And in the emergency management and incident management world,

so whether it's a coordinating action plan or CAP, like in an EOC or an incident action plan, we've given the final plans, final copies of those to the relevant partners or maybe surrounding jurisdictions if you're sharing, if it's not sensitive stuff. And then, of course, we're sharing that after action review and improvement plan to all the relevant personnel so they can all have a, here's what we did, here's what we did well, here's what we didn't do well, here's what we'll change next time, and all those

kind of lessons learned. Test five is similar and related under closing here. It's lessons learned. We documented them, right? And we have a comprehensive project review. So be objective, right? This is where I talked about in episode 30, those seven patterns for highly efficient project managers. Number one, take ownership, right? Extreme ownership, the whole Jocko Willink, Leif Babin thing, but it's legit, right? So if you're having objective reviews when you're doing your handoff

and closing, you need to be totally open about that. You need to take ownership as the project manager. What could you have done better? What did you do that worked well? Let others answer that as well. So creating that lessons learned documentation, do surveys, use online surveys. They're very helpful and it's a great way to capture things. Again, whether you get the standard kind of 30 to 40% response rate, it's better than nothing and gives you objective feedback. It's de-identified. You don't have to put names. It's very helpful.

Number six, task six under closing is archive project documents and materials. So basically we want to save everything, right? Make sure that we have archived it. I use a lot of online systems. So if you're using spreadsheets that are saved locally, make sure those are backed up somewhere. But largely, they'll live there. They're evergreen, as we say. They're going to be timely, but more so, they're not going to get lost.

I don't have to worry about version control because it's an online system. And I don't have to archive things because they live online. So really, when we change the statuses of them, they'll just become inactive, may drop off the report or stay sitting there but not be indicated whatever system you use. So kind of like we mentioned in the one before, this documentation unit and finance and admin are gonna put that packet together,

they're gonna archive and box up those doc boxes, doc meaning documentation boxes, and have nice file hanging holder boxes so there's a whole, it almost looked like a, if you watch a TV drama and they go into the courtroom and they have those boxes of evidence and references and things like that, that's what you're gonna hand back to the locality you helped with.

If you're an emergency operations center, you'll have similar stuff, because hopefully your folks were filling out those activity logs through those 214s and they were tracking and documenting as needed. Plus, there's probably a way to archive from those online systems for emergency management. And number seven and closing, last, certainly not least, has to do with those lessons learned we talked about is get feedback from your relevant

stakeholders, right? Using the tools and techniques is the verbiage they have in there. But essentially, did we do this like we were supposed to? Did it meet your satisfaction? What could we have done better? More than just the survey, have that discussion, keep that relationship, foster that relationship. Just like an emergency and incident management, we're going to make sure we send those improvement plans out. We're going to make sure that, again, we're transparent and objective in our after action reporting and have a realistic improvement plan, right? So we're not going to make this lofty goal and make it look good and make us all feel good and do all that, but not actually have to be able to do anything with it. It has to be practical and it has to be realistic, or we'll just keep repeating the same mistakes. And that's whether that's for

projects or emergency incident management, it doesn't matter, right? If we're not objective and open and honest with each other, then we're not going to get better or we're not going to be able to build on the things we did well. They don't need to focus on stuff we didn't do well. In fact, I like to cover areas for improvement, the three down, as they say, first. And let's finish on the uptick with our strengths. Let's build off that. So very short one in closing for this episode.

So let's touch on those knowledge and skills for the PMI stuff. Archiving practices, compliance, contract stuff, closeout feedback, performance measure techniques, project review, transition planning techniques. So almost exactly the same for emergency and incident management. How do we hand off? How do we demobilize? How do we make that after action report improvement plan? Fortunately, there's a whole template, right?

The Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program is your closeout report, like you use in projects is your lessons learned document that should include, you know, and here's how we could do things better. So I also am very open to how we can do things better, how I can do things better here on the show. So if you have feedback, reach out to me directly at people process progress at gmail.com. On LinkedIn, I'm Kevin Pinnell. Or the Facebook page for People Process Progress. Or in your comments, in your ratings, reviews.

But I appreciate you going through these five steps. I hope it was helpful. Again, to look at if you're a project manager, the crossover that goes into the emergency and incident management world like I used to be in and that a lot of you were in, or if you're currently in that emergency and incident management world, how you can use all those skills you're using right now and do project management, whether you leave the service you're in or the department or the industry you're in, or you just want to apply some more formalized project management stuff. I think that comparison we went through in the past five episodes will do that. And again, the document that I'll put on the pupilprocessprogress.com website is a good reference

to do that. So reach out to me anytime. Thank you all so much for all the listenership. We're gathering some momentum here and I hope it's been helpful for you. It's helped me. So stay safe, wash those hands. Godspeed.