Three things have to happen
- Verification — does what was delivered actually meet the acceptance criteria the team agreed to at kickoff? Not "does it look done" — does it pass the criteria written down at the start.
- Handoff — who's the long-term owner of this thing now? Who do tickets go to? What runbooks exist? If the project leaves the building without an owner, you've created an orphan.
- Retrospective — capture what worked, what didn't, and what the next team should know. Even just 30 minutes saves the next team a quarter.
Sign-off — the formal gesture
PMBOK calls it "close project or phase" — the formal ceremony where the sponsor accepts the deliverable in writing. The gesture matters. Without it, the project never officially ends, and you'll find yourself getting pinged about it eight months later. The sign-off email or document is what closes the loop and frees you to move on.
The retrospective discipline
Scrum bakes a retro into every sprint. Waterfall and traditional PM cultures often save it for project end — and then skip it because everyone's already on the next thing. Both are mistakes. The cheapest learning happens close to the event.
A good retro answers four questions:
- What did we set out to do?
- What actually happened?
- What worked well — to keep doing?
- What didn't — to change next time?
↳ the most common failure
The retro becomes a venting session about the team you collaborated with. McConnell calls this blaming people instead of systems. The good retro question isn't "who failed?" — it's "what would we change in our process so the same thing doesn't happen again, regardless of who's on the next team?"