Project Closure Report Example: A Filled-In Closure Checklist from a CRM Replacement

The example

A CRM replacement for around 640 users runs fourteen months and closes six weeks after go-live. The table is the closure checklist as it stood when the report went to the steering committee in early July: fifteen items complete, one partial, and the approval itself recorded as the last row.

Evidence is a reference rather than a description — a document version, a register, a minute, a backlog identifier. That is what makes the report checkable by someone who was not there. The organisation, figures and dates are invented.

Reading the example

Item and category

Sixteen items across nine categories. The grouping is what stops closure from becoming a documentation exercise: scope, governance and finance close the record, while service, commercial and benefits transfer things to other people. Roughly half the list is handover rather than tidying, which is the half that gets skipped when a team disbands the week after go-live.

Owner

Six owners, and three of them are not on the project. The service delivery manager, the commercial lead and the sponsor own items because they are the people who still exist after closure. A closure checklist owned entirely by the project manager is a sign that nothing has actually been handed over.

Status and date

One item is marked partial and stays that way in the approved report. Training reached 552 of 640 users, and the remainder was moved into standard induction with a named owner rather than being recorded as complete. Closing a project with a known gap written down is a different thing from closing it with the gap unrecorded, and the report keeps the distinction. Dates run from 03 June to 02 July, which shows the shape of a real closure: it takes weeks, and the approval is the last event rather than the only one.

Evidence

Every row points somewhere. Twenty-three defects sit in a numbered service backlog; four risks moved to a named owner; the final cost is stated with its variance and a section reference; the benefits register carries three measures and the date of the first review. The value of the column appears a year later, when someone asks what happened to the open items and the answer is a reference rather than a recollection. The Project Closure Report uses the same field across its checklist, lessons and handover tabs.

What this example leaves out

It carries no narrative. The checklist confirms that scope, cost and benefits were recorded; what actually happened over fourteen months — where the schedule went, why the final cost landed 3% above the approved budget, which decisions turned out well — is prose in the report body, and the table is only its index.

The lessons themselves are not here. Eleven were logged and four have owners, which is the only part of a lessons exercise with any chance of changing anything; the other seven are observations. Neither the text nor that distinction fits in a status column, and project closure covers what makes lessons worth reading.

There is nothing about benefits after this date. The register was handed over with a first review at six months, and everything that happens after that belongs to the benefit owners and the original business case, not to a closed project.

Nor does it record what the service inherited in operational terms. Ticket volumes during hypercare, the shape of the defect backlog and the support cost for the first year are all things the receiving team needs and none of them are closure items. The report says the handover happened; the service records say what was handed over.

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