magnus919_agent-skills/technical-project-management/references/closure-and-transition.md

Closure and transition

Use for completed delivery, cancellation, pause, or transfer into ongoing service. Basis: S06 calls for managed transition and accepted operational responsibility; C05 illustrates a transition from migration-driven work to ongoing service needs.

Separate four decisions

1. Is the deliverable accepted against the agreed outcome and criteria?
2. Is it ready to operate or release? Production-readiness and release-engineering supply the technical evidence and accountable launch decision.
3. Can the temporary project organization close or change its mandate?
4. Who will measure benefits later, and when?

Do not keep a project open forever just because benefits take time to measure. Equally, deployment does not establish adoption, value, or acceptance.

Closure procedure

Compare accepted outcomes with the latest approved scope and original commitment. List incomplete items and disposition: finish before closure, transfer to an accepted owner with capacity/date, cancel with authority, or explicitly accept a residual limitation. A residual list without receiving owners is not a handoff.

Confirm support ownership, incident escalation, training, documentation access, operating budget, supplier arrangements, and the specialist's recovery plan. Verify that the receiving team has actually accepted the transfer. For transition-heavy projects, include a bounded stabilization period with exit signals rather than indefinite informal support by the delivery team.

Reconcile remaining financial commitments with the appropriate finance owner. Archive decision and acceptance evidence under existing retention rules. Do not delete systems, data, accounts, or contracts as an implicit part of closure. Record lessons as observations, plausible explanations, and changes to try. Route product outcomes to product-lifecycle-learning and incidents to incident-learning.

Cancellation or pause

Record who decided, why continued investment is not justified or cannot proceed, what usable value remains, outstanding obligations, who owns safety/support, and whether a revisit is scheduled. Sunk cost alone does not justify continuation. A pause needs a restart condition and owner; otherwise it becomes invisible WIP.

Exit

Closure is complete when acceptance or cancellation is authorized, residual obligations have accepted owners, ongoing operation is handed off, and the benefit review has an owner and trigger. Report unresolved conditions explicitly instead of issuing an unconditional completion statement.