Closing a project with two clinics unmigrated, unsigned acceptance and no lessons

No - this would be early termination presented as successful completion. Closure requires that the agreed outputs have been accepted by the appropriate accepting party against defined criteria, that transition to the receiving organisation is complete, that residual issues and risks have been transferred with named owners, that financial and contractual matters are settled, that information is handed over in the agreed repository, that lessons have been captured, and that resources have been released through an agreed transition plan.

What is missing here:

• Scope is incomplete: 2 of 40 clinics are not live, and a workaround is not an accepted deliverable.
• Acceptance is from the wrong party: the IT director can accept the technical deployment, but the operations director owns the service and the benefits and must accept the operational outcome.
• Financial closure is not done: three approved changes have unprocessed invoices, so the final cost is unknown and the EUR 90,000 'remaining' figure is unreliable.
• Handover of information has failed: the workaround exists only in a personal notebook.
• Lessons have not been captured: the team is dispersed, so the organisational learning is being lost.
• Resources were released before transition was secure.

Releasing budget to another project is a portfolio decision and cannot be used to justify an incomplete closure.

Before the board:

1. Produce an honest status statement: 38 of 40 clinics live, workaround in use, no operational acceptance, financial position provisional.
2. Obtain the operations director's assessment - either acceptance or a documented conditional acceptance with a remediation plan and dates.
3. Convert the two-clinic workaround into a controlled operational work package with a named owner, budget, target date and documented procedure in the support knowledge base.
4. Settle or formally schedule the three supplier invoices and produce a forecast final cost, so the amount available for release is evidence-based.
5. Capture lessons now - a short facilitated session or structured written capture with the dispersed team - before knowledge decays further.

After a conditional closure:

• Assign ownership of the residual scope, risks and issues in the receiving organisation.
• Hand over documentation, configuration records and the support model to operations.
• Hand over the benefit profiles to the benefit owner with the current baseline.
• Produce a closure report that states what was achieved, what was not, and why, and get it approved by the sponsor.

If the conditions cannot be met, the correct decision is a deferred closure, not a waiver.

Remaining risks:

• Unaccepted outcome. Without operational acceptance, the benefits case is unowned; nobody is accountable when adoption stalls.
• Clinical and operational risk at the two clinics. A notebook-only workaround is a single point of failure and creates inconsistent service between sites.
• Reputational and contractual exposure with the supplier if invoices stay unprocessed, and with the funder or board if the report overstates completion.
• Knowledge loss as the team disperses, including lessons the next deployment will need.
• Portfolio distortion: releasing EUR 90,000 on a false completion claim moves risk onto the warehouse project's assumptions.

Advice to the sponsor: approve conditional closure only with a dated remediation plan, a named operational owner for the two clinics, settled invoices and captured lessons; otherwise defer. Present the board with a clear statement of what is complete and what is not, so the funding decision is made on accurate information. The judgement the exam is testing is that the project manager's duty is to protect the integrity of the closure decision, including when the sponsor's deadline and a competing funding opportunity create pressure to declare success early.