WMBA 6620 Week 11 Project Closeout Report Example

Closeout Report for Line 2: Handed Over Two Weeks Late and $6.71 Million Against a $7.4 Million Approval, Performance Target Met at 4,520 Loaves an Hour, With Acceptance, Administrative Closure and Five Lessons

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6620: Practices in Project Management

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Closeout Report for Line 2: Handed Over Two Weeks Late and $6.71 Million Against a $7.4 Million Approval, Performance Target Met at 4,520 Loaves an Hour, With Acceptance, Administrative Closure and Five Lessons

Performance Against Baseline

Harvest Lane Bakery's Line 2 project, set at a composite Green Bay plant, put a second sandwich bread line into the north bay and brought it to rate. This report closes the project as of April 14, 2028.

Scope. All seven deliverables were completed. No scope was added beyond the one approved change, the heat recovery oven, and no scope was removed.

Schedule. Handover slipped two weeks, from January 3 to January 17, 2028. The cause was the oven's factory acceptance test in August 2027, which found temperature variation at the belt edges above the vendor's specification. The vendor adjusted burner settings and retested, and shipment slipped one week. A second week was lost when bake validation in December required a third run after one loaf on the left edge read below the set point. Because the charter's first production date of February 14 sat six weeks after the planned handover, the slip did not affect customers.

Cost. Actual cost exceeded the version 1.1 baseline by about $414,000, or 6.6 percent. Three items account for most of it: the floor slab repair, about $95,000; a higher gas utility contribution, $132,000 instead of $85,000; and extended installer time and project management for the two-week slip, about $118,000. The rest came from smaller overruns in commissioning materials and training overtime. The escalation allowance and contingency together covered the overrun, leaving management reserve untouched. The final cost of $6.71 million stands about $690,000 below the $7.4 million approval.

Table 1

Final Performance Against Baseline

Cost figures include the approved heat recovery oven change; firms and figures are composite.

Acceptance

The sponsor, the Vice President of Operations, signed final acceptance on February 2, 2028, against the acceptance criteria in the scope statement. The plant manager signed for the handover package on the same date, with one condition: two sanitation procedures, for the cooling spiral and the slicer-bagger, were still in draft. Both were approved by the food safety manager on February 4, and the condition was closed. The first customer audit of Line 2, by the largest grocery chain's quality team on March 9, found one minor nonconformance, a missing calibration record for a probe thermometer, corrected the same day. The performance target was confirmed by the plant's production reports for the four weeks ending March 31.

Administrative Closure

Contracts. The general contractor, plumbing and electrical contracts were closed after final inspections and lien waivers. Retainage of 10 percent on each equipment purchase order was released after installation qualification, except for the oven's heat recovery unit, where $14,000 remains held until the vendor's two-year gas savings guarantee is reconciled in February 2030.

Purchase orders and accounts. All 41 project purchase orders are closed. The project cost account was closed on April 10 and its balance transferred to the fixed asset register, with the equipment placed in service on February 14, 2028.

Records. The schedule, cost records, change log, nonconformance log, quality records and validation reports are archived in the engineering document system. The risk register has been closed with the outcome of each risk recorded.

Team. The project manager returned to the plant engineering role. Contract installers were released in January.

Lessons Learned

Lessons logged at closeout often never reach the next project's practice (Williams, 2008), so every lesson below is tied to a specific change and an owner.

First, survey existing slabs before estimating. Core samples of the north bay floor, costing perhaps $4,000, would have found the cracked sections before the estimate was set. Change: core sampling is now a required step in the bakery's capital project checklist for any work on existing floors.

Second, engage the gas utility before charter approval. The utility's contribution rose by more than half once its design was done, and its date remained uncertain for months. Change: future projects will request a utility feasibility review during the business case.

Third, attend vendor pretests. The plant engineer's presence at the oven vendor's internal pretest in July 2027 shortened the response when the formal test failed. Change: vendor pretests are now standard for equipment over $500,000.

Fourth, delay hiring deliberately. Starting recruitment about seven months after ordering, rather than at project start, brought operators on board close to installation and avoided months of idle wages. Change: the lag will be used as a template.

Fifth, treat contingency as a register, not a percentage. Building contingency from identified risks meant two of the three largest overruns had been anticipated and funded. Overruns are the norm rather than the exception on major projects (Flyvbjerg, 2014), and this project's 6.6 percent overrun against baseline, covered by planned contingency, is a modest result by that standard.

The lessons have been entered in the bakery's capital projects folder, and the plant engineering manager will review them with the team planning the next line refurbishment, starting with the slab survey and the utility review.

Transition and Benefits

Line 2 is now part of the plant's operations, and its performance is reported in the plant's weekly production meeting. The project's business case depended on capturing declined private-label orders; by the end of March, the sales team had signed two private-label contracts worth about $6.8 million a year. The PMBOK Guide (Project Management Institute, 2021) treats benefits realization as continuing after a project closes, and the plant controller will report Line 2's contribution against the business case at six and twelve months.

References

Flyvbjerg, B. (2014). What you should know about megaprojects and why: An overview. Project Management Journal, 45(2), 6-19. https://doi.org/10.1002/pmj.21409

Project Management Institute. (2021). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) (7th ed.).

Williams, T. (2008). How do organizations learn lessons from projects, and do they? IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 55(2), 248-266. https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2007.912920