Project Management Lifecycle

Project management is a set of principles and cultures which get adopted in different ways at different places.

Everything has a lifecycle from software to project. Let us start by understanding what Project Life Cycle is.

Few terminologies get used very often in the project management area. It is good to learn about them and how you can leverage them in your work.

Project Life Cycle

There are five phases of the lifecycle of any project.

Initiation phase

It is the beginning of any project when the requirements come from the client. After that, business documents get created after brainstorming the idea with the team. Once the project document gets written, it goes for signoff from the leadership on the plan. Once the project plan is signed off, the budget gets allocated.

Steps to be taken

• Identify the problem statement that our project is trying to solve.

• Identify the scope of the project. It means we need to define all aspects of our project that will get delivered.

• Identify the project stakeholders who get affected by this project and who will be interested in it.

Planning phase

It is the second phase of the project lifecycle. The goal of this phase is to lay out a detailed approach to execute the project. A detailed project plan includes resources, dependencies, systems, cost, and timeline, etc. A Gantt chart can be useful to display the timeline and sequence of events.

Various plans get created during this phase. For example, a communication plan determines how we share information among stakeholders. The resource plan overlays the strategy to procure the resources. Also, the deployment plan explains the procedure on how to deploy the deliverables from the project.

In short, there are a lot of artifacts that get created during the planning phase.

Steps to be taken

• Identify the different phases of the project and timeline.

• Draft a plan for the project that includes budget and resources.

• Anticipate the risk and have a plan to mitigate them. We will need to identify the threats of our project. These risks can affect our timeline, and handle them appropriately.

• After gathering the resources, have a kick-off meeting to onboard our team.

Execution phase

Once we finish planning, then the next obvious step is to execute it. It is advisable to give a decent amount of time to the planning phase because it will save us time when it comes time to implement the plan.

This phase involves a lot of stakeholders. Also, we may be responsible for allocating the resources then assigning the tasks to each team member. We may have daily meetings to track the progress of the milestones or be asked to create a status report for high-level stakeholders.

Steps to be taken

• After dividing them into granular tasks, we will assign them to team members and track them.
• We may leverage some existing frameworks like Kanban, Gantt chart to track the progress. It will help in fostering the agile culture as well.

Monitoring and controlling phase

Monitoring and controlling occur concurrently with the execution phase. The main goal of this phase is to make sure that the implementation happens flawlessly and we achieve the objectives.

Also, we should closely control the scope creepuncontrolled growth of the scope of the project of the project to avoid deviating from the plan.

Steps to be taken

• We need to keep the budget in control and maintain the quality of work.
• Keep everyone updated on the status of execution and any roadblocks.

Closure phase

This is the final phase of the project. It begins when the project achieves its goal and objectives. We may be responsible for signoff from the stakeholders that the project objective has met and released the resources. It may involve closing the contracts and payments etc.

The most critical piece in the closure phase is the Postmortem or Retrospective of the project. We should never forget this step because it is very valuable. It gives us an opportunity to write all the learnings from the project and what we can improve next time while running this program.

Steps to be taken

Analyze the performance of the project and team members. Do not forget to reward and thank high-performing individuals. Learn from the postmortem and see what everyone can do better next time. Finally, check the accuracy of the risk assessment and see how many happened.

Summary

It may sound that initiating a project is a huge task. But, it becomes less challenging if we follow the divide and conquer approach. We should divide the target into phases and milestones. Some of these phases can have overlap and do not need to be mutually exclusive.

Overall, these different stages are dynamic which keeps changing with the project.

The merger of planning & execution

It is common to see requirements change as the project develops because it is hard to predict everything at the requirement stage. These requirements often lead to changes in the project plan and can sometimes cause delays. To fix this, agile culture and frameworks can allow for the flexibility to accommodate any changes and therefore reduce the chance of delays.