Program Closure Basics

What is program closing?

You made it! Congratulations! The program is now being closed out.

In the final phase of the program, the program team reviews the program's performance and documents the results. This includes identifying any lessons learned and making recommendations for future programs.

Reasons for closing

There are two possible reasons for a program being closed out:

1. The program successfully met all or most of its success criteria.

2. The program is no longer necessary or failed to deliver outcomes despite best efforts of the program team. For example, a program may be built on a hypothesis that if feature A is released, then it will drive X new users. It may be discovered partially through the program that the hypothesis isn't accurate.

How do you perform program closing?

Closing out a program as a technical program manager typically involves completing the following steps:

• Review and verify: Reviewing and verifying that all program deliverables (outputs) have been completed and meet the quality standards. Also, document the actual outcomes of the program compared to the original objectives and key results.

• Confirm operational support: Ensuring that future operational support of new products or features is successfully prepared with clarity around ownership. The program isn't done until the solution(s) can live on.

• Program retrospective: Conducting a "lessons learned" review to document any successes, challenges, and areas for improvement. You can loop this feedback to your fellow technical program managers as a case study for learning and growth as an organization.

• Next steps: Highlight or recommend any crucial next steps, if necessary. Some programs may wrap up with the original scope, but there might be more work to do to continue building on that success. You don't necessarily need to advocate for that, but you can recommend what the future should look like for this program.

• Archiving: Archiving project documents and records. Don't leave a mess behind you. Everyone will move on to new things, but you stick around to clean up the records, documents, and so on. Make sure the critical docs are updated with closure information and work tracking clearly indicates closure (Jira, Asana, and so on).

• Communicate closure: Communicating the program closure to all stakeholders, including the customers, program team members, and upper management. You should include the measurable outputs and outcomes that resulted from this program.

• Celebrate: Celebrating the program's successes with the team and stakeholders and to thank everyone for their contributions.

Common pitfalls

• Failing to formally close the program: A program that is informally continued beyond meeting the objectives (or not) leads to a lack of clarity of whether or not the program was successful or not. Doing a proper assessment at the end of the program, formalizing those results, and communicating them to stakeholders will help everyone feel a sense of closure. Otherwise its like reading a novel but forgetting to read the final chapter where all the loose ends are wrapped up.

• Failing to perform a retrospective: There is so much to learn by doing a retrospective at the end of the program. It not only will help you as a technical program manager, but it is extremely valuable feedback for the company.

• Failing to celebrate: There is a ton of hard work from many individuals and teams that go into the program lifecycle. Take time to recognize those people either through a celebration email or an actual event. Those relationships matter beyond the lifespan of the program.

• Leaving a mess: It is tempting to close the program and move on to the next great thing. You need to plan time to clean things up. There are a lot of documents, dashboards, reports, and work tracking artifacts that need to be tidied. This will help the company as a whole stay organized in future years. You would never cook a big meal in a kitchen and then not do the dishes, right? Clean up your kitchen. There are many meals to come in the future.