1.5 The project lifecycle
The four stages
If projects have a beginning and end, then what goes on between is known as the project’s life.
Now one of the things we like to do as project managers is break things down into smaller and easier-to-understand parts: we’re kind of simple like that!
So one way to understand the life of a project is as a series of four key, loosely consecutive phases.
Initiate
Project initiation is the process of converting our idea into a project.
It involves researching and workshopping the idea among stakeholders, establishing whether it is something we can and should do, and testing the best way of realizing it.
As part of the project initiation process, we will develop a robust business case and formally commit to the idea via a project charter.
Plan
Once we commit to the idea as a project, we can start planning the most efficient and effective path to delivery.
This will involve taking an inventory of all the resources available to us and determining their optimal use.
We express this through a scheduled and costed breakdown of all the tasks needed to complete the project, with corresponding budget lines.
We also take the opportunity to ‘look around corners’ and anticipate what could go wrong and how we might respond.
This might give rise to ancillary risk, stakeholder, procurement, and communication management plans.
Deliver
Unfortunately, as the late General Helmuth von Moltke pointed out: No plan survives contact with the enemy.
In projects (as in life), once we start delivering (or executing) our plans, we must be prepared to report on and react to the constantly evolving internal and external environments.
This is where the critical skills of project leadership are brought to bear.
Although they inform and govern the entire lifecycle, your ability to respond to and influence change will often be the difference between project success and failure.
And that is why, as part of the delivery process, we regularly revisit, fine-tune and update our project plan.
Close
Finally, once we deliver our project’s output – the product, service, or result that was once a humble idea – there are a number of closing activities we should undertake to ensure that:
- the project outputs are successfully assimilated into their new life (and outcomes realized), and
- we learn from our performance so that the next project we deliver is that much better again.
In the next topic, we look at how can the cost of changes to your project vary by their place in the lifecycle.
Integration
Ultimately, project management is the process of monitoring and controlling each of these stages.
The project lifecycle is also the roadmap we will use for this course.
Each phase – initiation, planning, delivery, and close – will be broken down by context into its dependent set of actions.
It is nonetheless important to appreciate that learnings introduced in the first Module may be equally relevant and applicable to the downstream processes of planning and delivery.
For example, a business case’s structure does not so coincidentally mirror that of a good change request in the delivery phase.
Similarly, the steps necessary to close a project should be considered as early as the planning stage if optimal delivery is to be realized.
For despite some well-intentioned theories, the practice of project management cannot be reduced to a spaghetti-like flowchart of ‘if / then’ protocols.
The art of project management lies in synthesizing and integrating this dynamic body of knowledge and applying it with expert discretion to the unique circumstances of your project today.