Step 7: The Grand Finale

Once your thing of beauty is unleashed on the world, don’t rush straight on to the next project: celebrate it. Now’s a good time to sit down with the whole team for a debrief on what worked well and what could work better.

How detailed a project evaluation is, and what it focuses on, depends on the size and complexity of the project and where the funding came from.

How do you close a project?

Get a fresh perspective

When you’re fully immersed in a project and battling deadlines left and right, there’s little time to reflect, and afterwards you need to decompress. Once the project is delivered, go for a walk in the park or on the beach, or have an informal chat with the team, to get a fresh perspective on how it went and free up your mind for the next one.

Achievements

As part of your review, look at what you’ve achieved and try to pin it down in more detail. Are there processes or methods you could reuse on another project, or share online? If you’ve been gathering images along the way, now’s the time to add them to your site or put them out on social media so people know what you did. It’s also a good moment to ask for a short testimonial.

Due process

You will have set objectives early on. Did you meet all the key ones? A project timeline has lots of points where you have to make choices. Did you make the right ones, and walk a path that got you to your destination on time and in style? If not, think about what you’d do differently next time.

This is also a good chance to reflect on how you ran the project: how you communicated, tracked progress, monitored risks and managed the budget. Would you use the same approach again, or change anything?

Record key learnings

It’s very easy to look back a year later and wonder, ‘how did we do that?’ A short write-up of the processes, software and hardware, how the budget matched the ambition, and why you made key decisions can give you a great head start on a similar project.

Celebrate!

It’s easy to move straight on to the next set of deadlines, but celebrating your wins matters. Gather your team regularly, and at the end of the project, pop open a bottle of something bubbly!

Contents of an evaluation report

If an organisation sponsored your creative project, an evaluation report is fairly standard practice. It’s a valuable way to appraise the project in detail within a set framework.

Key considerations are:

• Did it meet all the objectives set out early in the project?
• What benefits came out of the project for the organisation?
• Did it have a wider impact on a group of people or the general public?
• How could it be done differently or better next time?

The Evaluation Toolbox has more detailed guidance on how to write the report and what to include.

A parting shot

Finally, clear the decks and ‘reset’. File away the papers, tidy up the digital folders, and put things in order so that coming back to it in a year isn’t like digging for buried treasure. If you have a physical memento from the project, now’s the time to put it proudly on your wall.

This is the final part of a 7-part series. New to the series? Start at the beginning: 7 Steps to Successfully Deliver a Creative Project.