The closing process of a project is the last stage of the life cycle of a project, is to finalize all activities across all process groups of project management established in the PMBOK.
The closing process can be caused by two factors, when the project was completed or when the project has been interrupted by various factors and in both scenarios work involves administrative closure and contract closure (Shangera 2010, p.365).
Closing phase of a project completed
One factor of an administrative closure is revise if the deliverables planned were completed and has clients satisfaction, the second factor of an administrative closure is to conduct a post-project review (Shangera, 2010, p. 380), where they will discuss, that things what went well during the project, what could have been better and how the lessons learned might be applied in future projects.
Another factor analysis in an administrative closure is the analysis of human movement, at the end of the project human resources should be moved according to the activities are completed, this action should be planned at the beginning of the project (Project execution plan), during the closing phase we must ensure that human resources released should completed all activities assigned, including lessons learned and feedback from their experience, also we must communicate with the functional manager to define the availability of the workers to futures projects.
The closing contract phase analyzes various aspects agreed of the contract such as price, compliance with specific provisions and responsibilities, documentation of support for closing the contract, the contract closing process initially has a bargaining stage, if at this stage is achieved reconcile all aspects established in the contract, the contract can be closed but if negotiation does not reach any agreement you may move to another stage where arbitration involving a neutral outsider and that analyzes the factors in discussion, if the problem was not resolved the last stage is a legal analysis, in other words litigation is the last resort.
The complexity of a closure for a completed project will depend heavily on contract management during project implementation as well as a good control of project and quality control; whether these factors are well developed in the implementation phase is most likely that the project closure will not have problems.
In this case the administrative closure probably will not difficult because the project was interrupted and the most difficult in this case is the closure of contract because there is an agreement by both parties that not were completed, if the negotiation fails to reach an initial agreement is likely that the problem is resolved by arbitration or litigation.
In this part I have an experience in which the client asked us to terminate the project by other internal factors, in this case the negotiation was very sensitive because the customer had much to lose if it were applied to 100% of what was agreed in the contract (the contract was a lump sum), finally we agreed to put in standby all activities (include direct and indirect cost) and pay all activities executed at these moment, in this case, our company did not lose a potential customer and the client was able to reduce their losses