Most projects don’t fail at launch—they fail at landing.

Teams pour time and energy into planning, execution, and delivery. But when it comes to closeout, things start to unravel. Legal details get deferred. Financials linger. Documentation is scattered. And the lessons that could improve the next project quietly disappear.

Not because people don’t care—but because by then, everyone has already moved on.

That tension sat at the center of a recent Meaningful Project Closeout virtual roundtable, where practitioners compared notes on what actually happens at the end of a project—and what it would take to do it better.

Closeout Has a Momentum Problem

We started with a simple question:

What’s your biggest frustration with project closeout?

The answers were immediate—and familiar. Project managers are already thinking about what’s next. Final documentation turns into a scramble. No one is quite sure who owns what. Even getting the right people into a final review can feel harder than it should.

“By the time we get to closeout, everyone has mentally moved on.”

That’s the issue in a sentence.

Closeout isn’t breaking down because it’s complicated. It’s breaking down because it happens at the exact moment when attention is at its lowest. Treating it like a final step—something to “wrap up”— almost guarantees it will be under-resourced and incomplete.

It’s Not One Task—It’s a System

Most firms think of closeout too narrowly.

In reality, it’s a system made up of several different kinds of work, all happening at once. There’s the legal dimension, where documentation needs to stand up long after the project is over. There’s the financial side, where accounts have to be fully reconciled and closed. There’s the administrative work of organizing materials so they’re actually usable later. And then there’s the piece that’s easiest to skip: capturing the story of the project in a way that’s useful for marketing, proposals, and future teams.

None of this is new. Most firms do some version of it already.

What’s missing is the connective tissue—the sense that these aren’t separate tasks, but parts of a single process that needs ownership, structure, and follow-through.

The Shift: Don’t Wait Until the End

The most practical ideas shared in the session had one thing in common: they remove the idea that closeout happens at the end.

One approach focused on triggering closeout activities throughout the life of the project. Documentation is captured when it’s fresh. Requests don’t rely on memory. The process moves forward even when attention shifts elsewhere.

It’s not a dramatic overhaul—but it changes the dynamic completely.

Another perspective centered on the project debrief. Instead of treating it as a routine wrap-up, the debrief becomes a bridge to what comes next—structured to surface insights that feed directly into proposals and staffing decisions.

“We started treating the debrief as the first meeting of the next project.”

That small shift turns closeout from a retrospective into something forward-looking—and much harder to ignore.

Technology Helps—But It Doesn’t Solve This

Tools came up, as they always do. Systems that promise to centralize project data, make information searchable, and reduce the friction of tracking things down later.

And to be fair, they can help.

When project information is organized well, it’s significantly easier to reconstruct what happened and reuse it. AI is starting to play a role here too—especially in tagging, organizing, and surfacing information that would otherwise stay buried.

But no one suggested that technology is the answer on its own.

Without a defined approach to closeout, better tools just make the gaps more visible. You end up with cleaner systems—but the same missing information.

What This Really Comes Down To

Project closeout isn’t just administrative cleanup. It’s one of the few points in the project lifecycle where you can reduce risk, capture knowledge, and improve future performance—all at once.

And yet, it’s consistently treated as optional.

The firms making progress aren’t necessarily investing more—they’re being more deliberate. They start earlier. They decide who owns the process. And they treat what they learn from each project as something worth keeping.

If there’s a single place to start, it’s this:

Make closeout someone’s job—and make it part of the project, not the aftermath.

Where This Breaks Down in Your Firm

If you’re honest, you can probably see exactly where this is falling apart.

Is it ownership? Timing? Documentation? Follow-through?

Or is it that everyone assumes someone else is handling it?

We’d love to hear—what’s the hardest part of closeout in your firm right now?

Want to Hear How Others Are Handling It?

This article pulls out a few themes, but the full conversation goes deeper.

In the full session, members talk candidly about what they’re actually doing—where their processes work, where they break down, and what they’re still trying to figure out. It’s less about a perfect model and more about seeing how different firms are approaching the same problem in real time. If you’re rethinking your own closeout process, it’s a useful way to pressure-test your assumptions. Purchase the Meaningful Project Closeout recording here. [Be sure to login for SDA member pricing.]

I recently  received a link to a free ebook by PSMJ Resources on Financial Management.  I was skimming it and came to their discussion on overhead and the “11 Ways to Cut Overhead”. I was outraged by #9, Shift job-cost reporting, billing, and other accounting functions to the secretary who does it as a part-time, collateral duty.  In the name of all good design firm bookkeepers everywhere I would have thrown something right across the nexus in response, and it wouldn’t have been flattering. It’s right up there with their last Top Ten Overhead Cost Cutting List a couple of years ago when they said “Fire all of the Administrators.”

Their first two ways extolled the cost saving approaching of making printing a profit center.  (See list below)  If anyone still thinks that in this all electronic document/no printing 21^st century world, printing is still a line item that drives overhead rates, I’m not sure where they’re working.

Another of their other dubious methods included: “5. Discontinue in-house lunches;”  when, according to a survey by Peapod, companies that provide free food have happier employees compared with those who don’t get to chow down on their employer’s dime, and forward-thinking companies know that collaboration during non-paid lunches is a free hour of work for the firm.

So  – partially tongue-in-cheek (but grounded in truth) – I came up with my own List of Top Ways to Cut Overhead:

8 Ways to Cut Overhead:

1. Make sure the Owner has two credit cards – personal and business – and stops charging personal items on the business account.
2. Limit each principal to 1 golf tournament a season.
3. Eliminate big sporting events, deep-sea fishing excursions, season tickets to the neighborhood team, and kill the box at the alma mater university stadium.
4. Lower recruiting costs by requiring each professional to join a local professional organization, network, and find the good other professionals in the community by working with them
5. Do payroll in-house; eliminate the cost of the payroll service; have a fractional CFO to review quarterly statements instead.
6. Make job-cost reporting and billing a full-time position with an experienced person who can maximize revenue and cash-flow
7. Hire adequate administrative staff to take the burden off of the professionals so they have more billable hours. Push tasks down to the lowest cost level not up to the highest.
8. Forget about losing sleep over printing, or other ancillary charges in today’s non-print, cheap communications world. Keep people focused on the project delivery.

Do you have others?  Post them in the comments below and I'll  compile them all for a state-of-the-art article on cutting overhead in SDA Today.

Here's the full listing from PSMJ Resources:

1. Require all project-related printing to be done outside the firm so vendor invoices can be passed on to clients as reimbursable expenses.
2. Charge all plots to the client; no free in-house plots.
3. Eliminate company cars.
4. Charge computer purchases requested by an individual to his department or to the specific job for which it was requested.
5. Discontinue in-house lunches.
6. Limit company-paid professional registrations to one per person per year.
7. Limit company-paid membership in national organizations to one per person per year.
8. Eliminate your in-house bookkeeper; use outside service vendors for your payroll.
9. Shift job-cost reporting, billing, and other accounting functions to the secretary who does it as a part-time, collateral duty.
10. Use students as part-time employees for deliveries, routine filing, posting of invoices, and other clerical tasks. 

Deborah Gill, CPA, CGMA, CDFA is the Chief Financial Officer at Precision Measurements, Inc. (PMI), a 50+ person land-surveying firm located in Virginia Beach, VA.  Before joining PMI, Deborah was the Director of Business Operations at Clark Nexsen, PC, a 550 person multi-disciplined architecture, engineering, planning, and interior design firm located in VA, NC, GA, and DC.