Assessing The Practice Of Project Closure: Evidence From Water Supply And Sanitation Projects
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Date
2018-06-04
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This study is about the case of the Water Supply & Sanitation projects enabled to validate that the closure phase is the most neglected among the four main phases of project management, which requires the attention of specially project team. The study realized that projects practiced only signing of Provisional & Final Acceptance Certificates using financer’s format, handing over outputs & holding retention fund. At project closure phase, both contractual and administrative closures need to be performed respectively. The interview results justified the absence of standard project closure practices, such as detailed closure planning, no termination report (fig 4.1.1), use of standard templates, draw & archive lessons, release of remaining resources, freeing or retaining project personnel, etc. To initiate the project closure, a closure report should first be created; followed by approval of customer. Delay of closure created 17% dissatisfaction of beneficiaries. There is no awareness about the benefits of lessons to be drawn; stakeholders could not able to learn from the projects’ success or failures. The study enhances awareness & knowledge; where 83% of the respondents did not have knowledge about each benefit & developing training course manual for internal use. It needs to encourage project stakeholders to get the necessary feedback timely, as the study revealed that 73% of respondents were neutral about contractual closure. Further study may be important on the significance of financial implication on delayed release of resources during closure and study on the practices of knowledge transfer level from past lessons to current similar projects.
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Project closure, project delay, project stakeholders, closure planning