Post 5 - The Project Life Cycle

Now that we have moved past and described some important activities fulfilled through project management, I came across an interesting chapter in the PMBOK Guide that I thought to be suitable for this next post.

You may have asked yourself, like I did 'how are project activities organised or put together?'  I was able to discover answers to this through further reading. I was able to learn about something called a 'project phase'.

What is a Project Phase?

The real question should be, once the activities for a project have been defined, then how do they get processed?Do we execute each activity randomly or is there a set plan for organising them logically?

Well, I was relieved to find out that there was some organisation involved.  I learnt, It's a good idea to analyse activities and see how they can be grouped into smaller workable loads to make processes easier.

I believe that there's no better way than to group activities based on how logically related they are to each other in achieving a particular deliverable. These related grouped activities are called a 'project phase'.

Now that that's out the way, and we have a few different project phases consisting of different activities, how do we manage each of these phases? Is there some sort of logical ordering involved?

Well, this is where we introduce you to the 'project life cycle'

What is a Project Life Cycle?

A project life cycle is just that; a way of organising and moving through the different phases of a project.

In a more accurate definition, a project life cycle a series of phases that a project passes through from start to completion. The life cycle ensures that each phases of the project are completed.

What if a particular phase is incomplete?

This is where a 'phase gate' comes into play.

What is a Phase Gate?

A phase gate or control gate (there are a few different terms for this actually) is the review at the end of a particular phase to make a decision on whether to move onto the next phase or not. As you would have thought, the decision at each phase gate will of course be dependent on whether the activities of each phase have been completed sufficiently. 

If the progress is insufficient, then the project manager would decide on the necessary action to take. This decision could even be to repeat a particular phase or more.

As you can see, there's a lot involved in ensuring the project’s success. A thorough and regular analysis of the projects life cycle can indeed improve overall project performance.

Please feel free to add your thoughts or comments