PMP Free Course- Project and Development life cycles.
In a previous articles (free PMP Course - what is mean by Project, Program, Portfolio and PMO) we explained what is project lifecycle? Project life cycles provide a basic framework about how we manage a project. There is a generic project lifecycle that every project can be mapped into. It has four phases as we had seen before. These are:
Starting the project
Organizing and preparing
Carrying out the work
Ending the project
We will go over each phase during this article in details. However,
it is better to describe what each phase refers.
- Starting the project
Starting the project is first phase and during this phase a
business case will be a reason to initiate a project. As we seen in previous article
(part 1) a market need, technological advance, customer request, etc., might be
a reason to start a project. Once a project is started and project charter is
approved, planning phase starts.
- Organizing and preparing phase.
During this phase requirements of a project are detailed,
scope documents are prepared, budget and schedule planning and many other
aspects of a project are planned. Once project plan is finalized, executions
starts.
- Carrying out the work phase.
During this phase project team works to deliver scope of the
project. Project scope is delivered as per project managing plan prepared in previous
phase. If there were deviations of the plan, corrective and predictive action
will be taken to get back on track.
- Ending the project phase.
In this phase all scope must be completed and delivered to
the customer. Customers accept the final deliver officially and project closure
activities is done during this process.
There might be different project lifecycles for each industry
or organizations. For example, for a software development project, phases can
be as below:
Analysis, technical design, software development, testing,
user customer, test, and deployment, etc.
Project lifecycles can be either predicative or adaptive. However,
in project lifecycles generally there is one or more development of lifecycles
which is directly related to development of the product or services.
- Development lifecycle types.
Development lifecycle can be predictive, iterative,
incremental, or hybrid.
Now we will see which each lifecycle type mean in detail.
- Predictive (waterfall) lifecycle.
Scope, time, and cost are determined in the early phases of
the lifecycle. During the rest of the project if changing arise or if deviations
from plan occur, project management plan and documents are adapted to re-plan the
rest of the project.
- Iterative lifecycle.
Scope is determined early in the lifecycle. Time and cost estimates are determined as the team knows more throughout the project. In some cases, because of the context or uniqueness of the project, it might be hard to estimate cost or time for the activities of the project. In these cases, all the project scope is clear the project team does the cost and time estimation throughout the project as there are understanding of the production increases. There are might be a several iterations to finalize the end product of the project. However, each iteration must given add or improved functionality compare to the previous one.
- Incremental lifecycle.
Deliverable is produced through a series of iterations and
each iteration gives a new set of functionalities to the user. Project is
finalized once the final incremental delivers with all required functionalities.
- Adaptive (change-driven) lifecycle.
It can be agile, iterative, or incremental. The overall
scope of project is determined in beginning of the project. However, which of
the requirements or functions will be deliver in each increment is determent just
before each iteration starts.
For example, if the project is development of a website which
will have 50 screens at the end of the first iteration project team might
planned to deliver the first three screens. Note that these three screens must
be useable and testable at the end of first incremental.
- Hybrid lifecycle.
Is combination of predictive and adaptive lifecycle. For some
projects, other there are some parts or deliverables can be easily estimate in
planned, there are might be some parts would not be easily estimate. In this
case predictive lifecycle can be used to deliver one known requirement, will
adaptive lifecycle be use for fulfilling requirements.
Note that, it is adapting to the projects management team to
choose the best lifecycle type for the project after going over requirements
and expectations of the customer. Project management team should choose the
optimum project lifecycle type that matching with the characterizes of the
requirements of the project.