Capstone: Applying Project Management in the Real World
One coherent story from charter to closure
The capstone hands you a scenario and expects a consistent set of artifacts, not a pile of templates. The test is coherence: charter objectives map to WBS deliverables, which map to scheduled milestones, which appear in status reports with RAG status.
What strong work demonstrates:
- Initiation - a business case tied to organizational goals, a charter with measurable success criteria, and a stakeholder analysis that drives the communication plan.
- Planning - a deliverable-oriented WBS, realistic dependencies and critical path, a budget with contingency, and a risk register where every risk has an owner and a response.
- Execution - status updates with progress, blockers, decisions needed, and next steps; a change log showing impact analysis; an issue log kept current.
- Closing - formal acceptance/sign-off of deliverables, handoff or transition plan, lessons learned, and a closure report. Team recognition belongs here too.
Traps: confusing lessons learned (what worked and what didn't, captured continuously and summarized at close) with the closure report (final outcomes versus objectives); skipping formal acceptance; writing narrative status updates with no RAG, milestones, or asks; letting documents contradict each other (a schedule date that ignores a dependency stated in the risk register).
Communication is audience-specific: executives want outcomes, timeline, risks, and decisions; the delivery team wants task-level detail.
Rule of thumb before submitting any artifact: audit it against the charter. Every objective needs a measurable success criterion and a matching deliverable, and every deliverable needs a scheduled milestone and an owner.