INITIATION
The first stage in the project management life cycle is the initiation or conception stage.
The initiation phase can include:
- Meeting with the client to nail down their needs and wants.
- Creating a business case (reasons for project, its benefits, risks, etc.).
- Performing a feasibility study (required cost and potential value).
- Establishing a project charter (description of roles, responsibilities and goals).
- Assigning your project team (including the project manager).
- Setting up the project office (staff that oversee project management policies).
PLANNING
The second phase in the project management lifecycle is the planning phase – also called the design phase. During the planning phase, the client is involved for a deeper dive into exact project specifications.
As the name states, the planning phase includes developing a plan for the project, including the project timeline, tasks to be performed, and identifying possible constraints.
A constraint is a limitation or restriction. In project management, a constraint is anything that can delay or cause issues for a project, such as:
- Time
- Cost
- Size
- Quality
- Risks
The planning phase additionally includes these steps:
- Completing the financial planning and budgets – estimating cost.
- Gathering all needed resources – including putting together the team.
In this phase, we finalize the plans that we began in the initiation phase. This is where the final client approval on the project plan is obtained from the client.
After the plan is fully figured out, a project kickoff meeting is held where the project team is gathered and brought up to speed on everything.
EXECUTION
In the third phase of the project management lifecycle, execution, we get to work!
This is where all the preceding planning, analysis and research is put to use.
The execution phase includes:
● Software development – actual coding.
● Holding regular meetings to assign tasks, check in on projects and debug.
● Communicating with clients and management.
MONITORING
The fourth phase of the project management life cycle is monitoring. Technically, some of this occurs concurrently to phase 3 and some people actually consider them to be the same phase.
The monitoring phase consists of ensuring that quality is maintained. This stage consists of:
● Determining if a project is on schedule and on budget.
● Monitoring changes that occur with planning and the project – taking into account various issues that arise and how to handle them.
Phases three and four end with the deployment and delivery of the finished product.
CLOSURE
The last step in the project management life cycle is the completion – also referred to as the closure phase.
This occurs after the product is passed over to the client. This phase might include continued product support, documentation and maintenance.
This final phase includes:
● Analyzing the performance of the project and determining whether or not the project’s goals were met. This could include questions like:
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2
3
4
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○ “Were all the tasks completed?”
○ “Was the project completed on time?”
○ “Did we stay on budget?”
● Reviewing the performance of the team and evaluating how each person performed. This includes determining who finished their assigned tasks and the level of quality produced by each member.
● Completing all documentation and wrapping up all loose ends.
● Holding retrospective (looking back on something) meetings to see what lessons were learned. The purpose of this is to implement this data in future projects.
Basically, the project is finalized in this phase.
ADAPTING
Adaptive planning refers to changing one’s approach midproduction. A static (unchanging) plan would be a plan that is made and adhered to from beginning to end.
With adaptive planning, adjustments are made throughout the work process based on new data and unforeseen occurrences.
In software development, evolutionary development is an iterative (repeating a sequence wherein each step in the sequence brings one closer to the end goal) and incremental (done in small stages) approach.
This approach breaks tasks down into “bite-sized” chunks and progresses projects forward in small steps.
This is as opposed to knocking out the whole project in one big push.