Eskom Procurement Book 2015

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. 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 8.7.7 PROJECT CLOSURE AND LESSONS LEARNED ANALYSIS

192 CHAPTER 8