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The Final Report
What is the final report? It is a report that provides a summary of the project performance and how it went, either during that phase or during the entire project itself. As with all things in project management it can be a small piece of work or it could be a large detailed document in itself. It could be formal or it could be informal. It could range from a document just a few lines in your project measurement plan, or it could be the outputs of a retrospective if you’re delivering a feature using agile for example.
A retrospective occurs for us to say what went well, what didn’t go well, what still puzzles me and what have I learned. Asking those questions and feeding that back into the process and that could be documented as a final report for that iteration or that particular feature.
There are many different ways to use the final report. It can include things like the scope objectives – were they met? And evidence of them being met. Has the scope been verified, and has it been delivered and accepted by the stakeholders? The quality objectives, actual milestone delivery dates (when did we deliver these things) and any variances in those. Did we say we’re going to deliver here but we actually only delivered there? What were the variances, and why.
This also feeds into our lessons learned register. Lessons learned from the project will really help future projects if this information is available.
We’ve got cost objectives – the actual versus predicted cost, reasons for any variances, same with the schedule and same with any risks. Did we encounter risks? How did we resolve them? All of that can go in the final report.
The final report puts it in a nice sort of nice package for the end of project report. Part of this could also include a handover document to whoever you’re handing over to or ultimately delivering this project to. All that information that they might need down the track, who to go to for this system access, who to go to if they need to get more of this resource once it’s gone into BAU. That can be part of a handover and can potentially go into the final report as well.
– David McLachlan