Close an unfinished project in Primavera P6

In unfinished projects the practice to keep deleted activities is even worse.

GAO Schedule Assessment Guide Best Practices for Project Schedules suggests keeping deleted activities and logic while setting duration to 0. See page 140 of 240.

http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/674404.pdf

GAO is wrong, leaving deleted activities as well as leaving the original logic in place is not best practice:

• It is a poor workaround used when your software is incapable to show activities in included in one schedule version but not in another.
• I am not surprised with GAO recommendations as they are biased in favor of software incapable of dealing with comparison of schedules with deleted activities.
• Leaving deleted activities can distort cost loading if you if you miss to delete any fixed cost assignment.
• Leaving deleted activities can be confusing and misleading
• Incoming/outgoing remaining lags might need to be adjusted, mere change in activity duration do not tackle this issue.
• Leaving deleted activities can lead to wrong logic; it is a lazy scheduler approach.

Among other things the last schedules update:

• Shall be an update that includes whatever happened up to the closing date.
• To say that at closing dates suddenly all activities stopped is hard to believe, most probably these activities finished at some time before project end. 
• Any started activity must have a finish date before project closure.
• A project that have unfinished activities is an unfinished project and not a closed job.
• Activities or portions deleted on any update have no place in such schedule; freeze them on a baseline.
  • It makes no sense keeping hundreds of activities if a building on a job is taken out of the contract.
  • It makes no sense keeping hundreds of activities if the building design changes radically because of unforeseen soil conditions or for whatever reason.
  • Keeping no longer existing activities makes no sense. 
• Use Baseline functionality to record schedule just before the work stoppage or store under a separate file name.
• https://tensix.com/2013/11/restoring-and-converting-baselines-in-primavera-p6-professional-r7-0/
• After a project is closed whatever happen in the future belongs to another project otherwise it is not true it was a closed project.
• The last schedules update shall be an update that reflects your final reconciliation of the project budget. If activity duration is reduced it does not mean all budgets are automatically reduced. This can become an issue when analyzing the portfolio schedule.
• In summary:
  • You shall not leave it as is.
  • Started activities must show a finish date prior to closing date.
  • Budgets shall be reconciled.
  • Activity that has not started and will never do has no place in any schedule update.

Spider Project allows you to display deleted activities on a conspicuous way when comparing schedule versions and without the risk of interfering with current schedule, easy and transparent. If your software lacks enough functionality it is no excuse to promote such misleading and error prone practice.

ok but first make a copy of the schedule and leave it as it just in case it reopens. It cant hurt. Name the project junk for superceeded something like that  

you have several options

option #1

Leave it as is. This way if the project ever re-starts you know what still need to be done as per the original scope.

option #2

for every activity that has started but has not finished make the actual finish date equal to the date that you were instructed to Stop and put a note in the notebook tab saying what you did and why

option #3

or every activity that has NOT started and has not finished make the actual start and actual finish date equal to the date that you were instructed to Stop and put a note in the notebook tab saying what you did and why. You can do this with a global change. 

Option #4 

Leave it as is and for activities that are started but not done and or not started and not done and put a note in the notebook tab 

Option #5

Leave as is and in the Project Name say that the project was closed on such and such a date