Closing well: debriefs, results, KPIs

A triumphant conclusion or a bitter epilogue? The close of a project can be either, depending on how it is handled. And it is almost always the most neglected phase: the project has been delivered, the team is already on something else, the client has new urgent matters. So the same lessons are learned again, on every project, in the most expensive way.

What closing means

Closing isn’t delivering. It is a series of steps, each of which, if skipped, comes back as a problem.

• Formal acceptance. The client confirms that the work matches what was agreed, according to the acceptance criteria written in the Statement of Work.
• Administrative close: invoices, supplier contracts, final hours and costs, final margin compared with the planned one.
• Archive: source files, final versions, documentation, decisions, somewhere someone can find them a year from now.
• Handover to whoever will manage what was produced: maintenance, support, the client’s team. Access and credentials handed over and, where needed, revoked.
• People: the team is officially released, thanked, and whoever did good work gets explicit recognition.
• The debrief. The format is further down.

Measuring: project and results

To know whether a project went well you need two different measures.

How the project went: time, cost, quality against the plan. It is the monitoring done during the work, comparing actual progress with planned progress every week, which at the close becomes a balance sheet.

What it produced: the results for the client. A website delivered on time and on budget that nobody uses is not a success. Measuring results means gathering the data, reading it, communicating it understandably and deciding what to do with it.

KPIs

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a measure that tells you whether an objective is being met. In digital and creative projects they help turn often fuzzy objectives into something you can verify.

Type	Examples
Efficiency	Milestones met; average time to complete a task; average time to resolve issues
Quality	Errors found after delivery; number of revision rounds; compliance with agreed standards
Budget	Variance between planned and actual; final margin; share of unplanned costs
Client	Stated satisfaction; Net Promoter Score (how likely the client is to recommend you); returning clients

How to choose them: few, aligned with the project’s objectives, genuinely measurable with the data you have, with a starting value and a target. And with someone who measures them, at set times. A KPI nobody looks at is just a number.

The debrief

It is the meeting where the team stops to look at the work done. It is also called a post-mortem, a retrospective, lessons learned. It serves to assess the project with some distance, to turn successes and difficulties into learning, to bring out the weak points in processes, to share what each person has learned. It can be held at the end, but also halfway, while there is still time to correct course.

What makes it hard: lack of time; the absence of a feedback culture, which turns it into a trial; emotions, because talking about mistakes is uncomfortable; the risk of sliding into a list of complaints or into self-congratulation; and above all the lack of follow-up. A debrief that produces no actions is a theoretical exercise.

A ready-to-use format

Step 0 · Welcome. Make clear what you are doing (an open discussion of the work done together), why (to learn from everything, positive and negative) and how (a round of the table, to hear everyone). And the rules of engagement:

• the goal is to improve how we work together, so we need to be as honest as possible;
• telling ourselves everything went fine is no use;
• everyone gets to speak, and every perception is equally valuable;
• every point of view counts, if it brings something constructive;
• the key is listening: this is not the time for rebuttals or recriminations;
• no opinion should be taken personally;
• if a mistake was made, the only thing that matters is becoming aware of it so it doesn’t happen again;
• only those who don’t work never make mistakes.

Step 1 · Warm-up (3 minutes). Everyone reflects alone on a few guiding questions. What worked best? What worked least? What was the biggest problem? What would you improve? Are you satisfied with what we did?

Step 2 · Round of the table (5 minutes each). Everyone speaks, the others listen and take notes.

Step 3 · Wrap-up. Everyone completes three sentences:

• From this project I learned that…
• From today I intend to…
• From today, all together, we should…

The sentences in the third line become actions, with a name and a date.

Afterwards

Lessons learned must be written down and stored somewhere the next team can find them. And they must be reread: the best moment is the kick-off of the next project. That is where yesterday’s debrief becomes tomorrow’s risk plan. For the same idea applied outside the office, there is the guide Failing better.