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CHAPTER 8
PURCHASING ANALYSIS TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES
• Hold status meetings (weekly team meetings):
The most common form
of status-data gathering is done in status meetings. These meetings are
generally held weekly and should include the entire project team.
• Create team status reports:
Rather than hold weekly status meetings, some
project managers prefer to have team members issue written status reports.
These are then submitted to the project manager by a deadline, usually noon
on the Monday following the As-of-date.
8.7.7 PROJECT CLOSURE AND LESSONS LEARNED ANALYSIS
All projects have an end point. Closing out the project is as important a phase of
the project as any other and should follow certain procedures with the objective
of:
• Effectively bringing the project to an end, according to agreed contractual
requirements.
• Preparing for the transition of the project into the next operational phase.
• Analysing overall project performance with regard to financial performance/
data, schedules and technical efforts.
• Closing out the project team and transferring the team to other work/projects.
Project success or failure often depends on project management’s ability to
handle project closeout effectively. Some suggestions are given below that can
help to increase organisational effectiveness in closing out a project:
• Carefully plan the project closeout on the part of both the project and functional
managers (operations).
• Establish a simple closure procedure that identifies the major steps and
responsibilities.
• Treat the closure phase like any other project phase with clearly delineated
tasks, agreed-on responsibilities, schedules, budgets and deliverables/results.
• Emphasise the overall goals, applications and utilities of the project as well
as its business impact.
• Secure top management involvement and support.
• Be aware of conflict fatigue, shifting priorities, and technical or logistics
problems.
• Conduct a ‘lessons learned’ analysis of all those aspects of the project that
went well, areas for improvement and lessons learned. These should be
documented and shared with other members of the team for future projects.
The lessons learned may be of a technical nature and/or from a programme/
project management point of view.
8.8 CONCLUDING REMARKS
This chapter provided an overview of three key groups of tools and techniques
that can be used to enhance procurement efficiency and effectiveness. The
chapter covered the use of value analysis and its role within procurement. Value