Overview

Very few international engineering projects come to a clean closure at the end of the projects. There can be scope extensions in your project. There can be several leftover deliverables that were not accepted by the customer during the initial acceptance tests, and these deliverables might be going through some revisions to satisfy the customer. The customer might not have reviewed and approved all project documents to approved without comment status. Some of the regulatory agency design or test certificates might not be complete. There can be installation and start-up issues at the overall project site. The overall project might be delayed, postponing your installation and start-up tasks. The customer might have lost interest in the project or shelved the project due to market pressures. If you have been designing a data communication module, your customer s competition might have come out with an improved module at an earlier time to market. The international standards covering the application of this data communication module might have shifted to your customer s competitive design.

The following project closure tasks that are a must for an international engineering project manager are meant for a project that is coming to a successful and clean conclusion. If for any reason the project lingers on, the project manager should complete the closure tasks that are feasible for that particular project.

For example, in one of the system design projects for offshore oil industry, the customer s project team was dismantled and reassigned to other projects as soon as...