MGMT 645 Week 7 Project Closeout/Lessons Learned Example

Project Closeout and Lessons Learned: The CPA Firm's Secure Client Portal

Project Summary

The secure client portal launched on January 12, as scheduled, one week before the firm began preparing returns. Every active client received a portal folder and a checklist, all twelve staff completed training, and the firm stopped accepting tax documents by email on January 5, with a documented exception for clients who cannot use the portal. The project finished $320 under its $14,500 budget. Both quality criteria from the charter were met in the season's opening month.

Results Against Success Criteria

Schedule and Cost

The schedule held at every milestone except one. Building the business clients' checklists took three days longer than planned, because 31 business returns included forms the import did not recognize, and the senior accountant added them by hand. The operations manager chose to absorb the delay rather than shorten the pilot, judging that a smaller pilot would weaken the main quality check in the plan. The delay was absorbed by moving the second staff training session two days later, and the pilot started on time. The second pilot added by the Quality Improvement Plan used two days reserved for invitation corrections, and invitations went out on December 31 and January 2 as planned.

Staff overtime ran $460 over its line because the help line received about 340 calls in the first two weeks of January, more than expected, mostly from clients over seventy. The vendor's added work on scan mode and the tax-year display cost $280. Both were covered within the total budget.

Quality Results

The first pilot reached 60 percent complete first uploads. After the improvements in the Quality Improvement Plan, the second pilot of 20 clients reached 81 percent, and the operations manager adopted the changes for all clients. In the first four weeks of the season, 87 percent of 612 submitted document sets were complete on first upload, above the 85 percent target, and no document was filed to the wrong client. A new Pareto count of the season's 104 defects showed a different leading problem: charitable donation receipts, missing from 31 sets, now ranked first, followed by missing brokerage statements at 22, which had fallen from the top position. Rose (2014) describes quality improvement as continuing rather than finished, and the firm will add a receipts reminder to the February 20 message as the next improvement.

Stakeholder Feedback

The firm asked for feedback from both clients and staff. A three-question survey sent to all clients after their first upload drew 412 responses: 81 percent said the portal was easier than email, 12 percent said it was about the same and 7 percent said it was harder, most of them clients over seventy. Several clients wrote that the checklist helped them see what they had forgotten. Staff feedback, gathered at the lessons-learned meeting, was more mixed. Preparers liked receiving complete sets and no longer saving attachments by hand, but two senior staff said the first weeks of help line calls took time away from returns. The managing partner noted that two long-time business clients who had threatened to leave over last year's delays renewed their engagements, and one referred a new client because of the portal.

These responses matter for quality as well as satisfaction. Rose (2014) treats the customer's judgment as the final measure of quality, and the client survey confirms what the completeness metric showed: the product works for most users and needs more support for a minority.

Acceptance and Handoff

The managing partner formally accepted the project on January 16 after reviewing the results table. Ownership of the portal passed to the office administrator, who now manages client access and the help line, and ownership of the checklists passed to the senior accountant, who will update them each December. The vendor's implementation contact was replaced by the firm's ordinary support channel. The PMBOK Guide treats the transfer of the product to operations and the archiving of project records as part of closing a project (Project Management Institute, 2017), and the firm's project folder now holds the charter, plan, quality improvement plan, change log and this report.

Lessons Learned

Anbari et al. (2008) treat the review held at a project's end as a skill organizations must build on purpose, not a courtesy meeting. The team held a one-hour review on January 15 and recorded six lessons:

• 1. Business checklists took longer to build than planned because the import missed uncommon forms; next December, the senior accountant will review business returns for unusual forms a week before the import.
• 2. The pilot found problems that no one inside the firm had predicted; future client-facing changes will include a pilot of at least 25 clients, owned by the operations manager.
• 3. Older clients needed more help than budgeted; next year the help line budget will be based on this year's call counts, and the office administrator will call clients over seventy before invitations go out.
• 4. Checklist wording caused the largest defect; the senior accountant will test checklist wording with five clients each year before the season.
• 5. The second pilot showed that small, fast tests of a change work; the operations manager will use the plan-do-check-act cycle for the receipts reminder.
• 6. The fixed deadline kept decisions quick; future firm projects will set a firm end date in the charter.

The project met every criterion it set itself, and its most useful result may be a firm that now measures its own work.

References

Anbari, F. T., Carayannis, E. G., & Voetsch, R. J. (2008). Post-project reviews as a key project management competence. Technovation, 28(10), 633-643. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.technovation.2007.12.001

Project Management Institute. (2017). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) (6th ed.).

Rose, K. H. (2014). Project quality management: Why, what and how (2nd ed.). J. Ross Publishing.