The project thought it was finished.

Yay.

The client handover had happened. The useful things had been delivered. Everyone was ready to celebrate, archive the folders, make a cup of tea and move on.

To be honest, I was ready to move on too.

But on Thursday, I was standing by the metaphorical door with a clipboard. Because before a project is allowed to finish at Jessanol HQ, it has to complete our project closure process — and do its paperwork.

I suppose it is a bit like any job. You do the thing, and then you write about doing the thing. So it is that bit.

The bit no one really wants to do. It is not exciting. It does not come with a dramatic reveal or a round of applause. And no one cares. Well, not for a while anyway.

I call it the reviewing, documenting, templating, updating and making-sure-we-can-do-this-again-without-reinventing-the-wheel bit. Catchy, I know. But genuinely, this is where the gold is. And I mean real money.

We have just wrapped up another project, which means I have been back through the process making sure the SOPs are up to date, the templates are where they should be, the project notes make sense, and the useful things we learned do not disappear into the mist.

Or worse, into my brain.

My brain is not a suitable long-term filing system. To be honest, it is not great at short-term filing either.

It has many tabs open at any one time. Some are useful. Some are colour coded. Some are probably playing music from somewhere, but refusing to identify themselves. So I write things down properly.

And no, I do not apologise for long SOPs. They are not written for a decorative folder. They are written for me, for associates, and for future versions of Jessanol who may need to know exactly what happened, why we did it that way, what changed halfway through, and where on earth that very specific spreadsheet lives.

This matters even more when I am planning to take a few days off, because my head will be anywhere other than work, which is exactly the point.

But the business still needs to run. Associates may need to pick things up, clients still need things to happen, and when I come back, I would quite like to remember what I actually do for a living.

Fortunately, we have got this down to an art: templates to fill out, Aidan drafted in to help, review and editing by me, then final polish and everything stored where it belongs.

This week has also involved onboarding a new project, Asana wrangling, process tweaking, more automation, documentation, and me asking whether we can make something work better, behave better, or be less likely to ambush future Jane.

Poor Aidan has had quite the workout. He has been promoted into Asana administration, which I am not sure he was emotionally prepared for. Time tracking has been a slight nightmare. Two monitors are not cutting it. And possibly Aidan needs his own desk. So no, the project close-down is not the glamorous bit. But it is the bit that means the next project starts better than the last one ended.

And that, frankly, is why the project is not allowed to leave until it has handed in its homework.