Writing a Project Completion Report
What to Do
1️⃣Schedule time to review the Eight Questions to Answer about project cycles and reflect on your work in this project.
2️⃣Take notes as you think about the question. Group the discussion into outcomes (or documentation), accountability, evaluation, and learning. You want to find the strengths and weaknesses in each area by comparing your work to the expectations of the assignment.
3️⃣Write your thoughts into an organized and formal memo for the project manager AND as something you can reference later (for example, you might pull up an older retrospective when beginning a new group project to set goals, intentions, and expectations). Follow the remaining information below.
4️⃣Remember to review your notes and think about why you chose the Wiki Software you did for the project. The memo needs to also explain how your software research and choice makes sense for the project.
A retrospective memo is a document that captures lessons learned after completing a project, task, or event. It’s an assessment tool teams and individuals use to reflect on what worked well, what didn’t, and how to improve for future endeavors.
Key Elements of a Retrospective Memo
- Introduction: Briefly describe the project or event and its objectives.
- Achievements: Discuss what went well during the project. Highlight the successes and what contributed to them.
- Challenges: Identify areas where you faced difficulties, things that didn’t go as planned, or areas that need improvement.
- Learnings: Discuss the lessons learned from both the achievements and challenges.
- Future Improvements: Provide suggestions or action plans for improving in the future based on the learnings from the project.
Why Write a Retrospective Memo?
Retrospective memos are valuable for several reasons:
- It allows you to reflect on your work, leading to personal and professional growth.
- It provides a record of successes and failures, which can be helpful for future reference.
- It encourages continuous learning and improvement.
- It promotes transparency and open communication within teams.
- It can be a source of motivation, as it allows team members to acknowledge their accomplishments and understand how they can overcome their challenges.
Writing a retrospective memo is a proactive step towards continuous improvement. It fosters a culture of growth and learning within the organization, leading to improved performance over time.
Basic Memo Outline
To: Identify a Leader for your Start-Up (make it up or use HB)
From: Your Name, Associate Technical Writer
Date: THE DATE
Subject: Pick 3-9 words that describe what your memo is about (something about your project completion/status report and team retrospective)
Begin your memo with a brief context and purpose statement setup. Your memo purpose should identify that you are detailing the project’s success and documenting the team retrospective. You need to discuss what went well, what could have gone better, what challenges you faced and overcame them, what you are proud of, and what you learned that can be applied to future projects.
The goal of this document is to capture how you accomplished the outcomes of a project and create a record of your work. A Project Completion Report is primarily used to achieve the following objectives:
- Documentation: A written record of the outcomes, output, impact, and cost-effectiveness of the project. It serves as historical documentation that can be referred to in the future. This is a great place to discuss why your Wiki Software was the best choice for the project.
- Accountability: It allows teams to account for the resources and efforts expended on a project. It’s essential for demonstrating transparency to stakeholders and donors.
- Evaluation: The report assists in gauging the project’s success by comparing planned versus actual outcomes. It enables management to measure effectiveness and efficiency. This is another area you should talk about the Wiki Software research.
- Learning: The report helps identify best practices, challenges faced, and lessons learned, which can be utilized to guide future projects.
Once you introduce the memo, you should establish big themes for your project’s work with headings that align with the completion report objectives listed above.
Under this heading, you must detail the documents created or utilized during the project. Information to be included should encompass types of documents, their purpose, and how they contributed towards the completion of the project. You may also want to capture any issues or challenges encountered in creating, using, or distributing these documents.
- Enter strengths your team demonstrated about documentation. Typically, this could include excellent record keeping, clear and concise document creation, effective document version control, etc.
- Enter weaknesses you had about documentation. This could include a lack of attention to detail, distribution and version control issues, difficulties in creating clear and concise documents, etc.
This heading allows you to discuss the roles and responsibilities of each team member. Describe how tasks were allocated, accountability was ensured, and any training provided to team members. Reflect on your team’s ability to stay accountable to the project’s tasks, goals, and timelines.
- Detail here any noteworthy accountability practices your team exhibited. This could be regular progress updates, stringent task allocation, adherence to set roles, etc.
- Discuss here any issues around accountability that surfaced during the project. Perhaps there were problems with understanding roles, sticking to deadlines, or miscommunications.
Under this heading, discuss how the finalized project was reviewed against the set objectives and standards. Explain the evaluation method(s) used, how the indicators of success were measured, and the project outcomes.
- Address the positive aspects of your project related to evaluation. This might include achieving the intended outcomes, efficient use of evaluation methods, achieving standards above those intended, etc.
- Under this section, document any challenges or limitations you encountered during the project evaluation. This could include failing to meet some objectives, inaccuracies in the evaluation process, etc.
This section documents the learning points the team has identified from this project. This includes both the enhanced skill sets and the areas identified for improvement. Mention the potential steps to skill development that need to be taken for future projects. Highlight here the key learning that proved beneficial for the team. This might include mastering new tools and processes, improved communication, etc. Highlight the areas where the team acknowledges the need for improvement or learning. This might include areas where the team had a steep learning curve, identified knowledge gaps, etc.
This template provides a comprehensive structure to record and reflect on your project’s journey. Please be as detailed and transparent as possible in each section. The memo will be 2-4 pages.
