Anonymous
Winding down a project requires several tasks from ensuring all the tasks associated with a program are in a final state. Those final states can be completed, abandoned for tasks that are not required anymore or moved to a future program.
Ensure the services and tooling outcomes of the program are transitioned to the final users who will maintain and operate them in the long term defining a clear ownership.
After all the tasks are in a finalized step the next step is communications. The communication channels can include email and presentation in all hands. The communication includes a summary of the program, some top level metrics showing the impact as compared to the baseline, and a list of people with their contributions to the program.
Managing a retrospective to collect information about what went well, what could be improved and the lessons learned that can be useful for future programs.
The final step is to archive all the documents and resources associated with the program.
There are a few challenges associated with winding down projects. For example during the Google Home Infrastructure program there were hundreds of thousands of legacy code that was kept for half a year after the project completion and was tracked separately. Because the program touched multiple areas and technical and not technical stakeholders there was a need to create multiple versions of the program completion announcement with different levels of detail. For the retrospective I collected information from risk management, tasks that were deprecated, things that could have been done differently and tasks that were moved to future programs.