It’s Closing Time

Thank me later for ensuring that the song by Semisonic is stuck in your head for the rest of the day. 

A key component of continuous improvement is organizational learning. It is another way to benefit from all of the good work and effort you put forth on a day to day basis.   However, oftentimes we put so much into building decks that we don’t synthesize what we learn so that our organization gets better.

Year end is a great time to make sure all of the gains you made this year are documented for both yourself and the organization. Further as leaders, we must protect our teams from the impact of both quiet-quitting and The Great Resignation, as the tangible and intangible losses to organizations are significant.  Use this checklist to make sure you have laid the building blocks for a fast start for 2023! 

Closing Checklist

Postmortems

Conduct an exercise that reviews what you want to start, what you want to discontinue and what you want continue. 

Make recommendations

Jot down your ideas for potential  improvements across the business

Special projects list

Start and maintain a wish list of items that would add tremendous value, but may be currently out of scope or insufficiently resourced.  Always have these in your back pocket if someone has some extra money that needs to be spent.

Look to the future

Given current data, what does complete look like for this effort?   How does this align with the  scope of the project commissioned for this year.  What do you need to include next year?

Complete archiving activities

Review your files pertaining to a project or an initiative and make sure that a consistent naming convention is applied and that your file structure is descriptive and logical.   Complete file metadata for extra credit.  Move files to be retained to an archival location and delete low value files.   

Communicate project learnings

Be creative in how you tell people about your outcomes and what you learn from your work. You might prepare an executive summary, capture and share user feedback, create a video update or synthesize information into an infographic. This will set your work apart from your peers and quickly communicate the trajectory of your project.