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Selecting a Lifecycle

June 21, 2007 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Lifecycle Phases

Selecting a Lifecycle
By Johanna Rothman

One of the most useful decisions a project manager can make at the beginning of the project is to choose a lifecycle for the project. Here’s the way I think about lifecycles:

Project Lifecyle Type Lifecyles Strengths and Necessary Conditions Project Priorities Prognosis for Success
Waterfall: A serial lifecycle that in its pure form does not consider feedback (I have only met waterfall projects that consider feedback) Serial
  • Known and agreed-upon requirements
  • Well understood system architecture
  • Requirements stable over project
  • Development team stable over project
  1. Features
  2. Low defects
  3. Time to market
 Maybe successful with feedback. For projects longer than 4 months, always increases project duration
Spiral, Evolutionary prototyping, Staged-delivery, Evolutionary delivery Cyclical
  • Manages technical risk
  1. Features
  2. Low defects
  3. Time to market
 Successful
Design-to-schedule (Excellent for concurrent engineering) Chunking
  • Rapidly changing or incompletely known requirements
  • Manages schedule risk
  1. Time to market
  2. Low defects
  3. Features
 Successful
Agile (Scrum, XP…) Cycles of chunks
  • Constant access to customer
  • Large enough team
  • Manages both technical and schedule risk
  1. Time to market
  2. Features
  3. Low defects
 Successful
Code and Fix Random
  • Unplanned projects
  1. Time to market
  2. Features
  3. Low defects
 Unsuccessful

Not every lifecycle is appropriate for every project. In fact, many lifecycles are inappropriate for many projects. If you can’t determine the requirements fully at the beginning, don’t use a waterfall. If you don’t have a lot of time, plan to chunk the product, either with the chunking lifecycles or with the agile lifecycles.

Test groups get into trouble when they think they can use a waterfall lifecycle. Most of the test groups I’ve met don’t know the requirements before they start developing their tests, so I regularly recommend that the test groups choose a different lifecycle from the rest of the project. Sure, it’s harder to integrate the milestones, but how else can you succeed?

Think about what your customers think is important (time to market/release, feature set, defect levels). In what order does schedule, feature set, or defects matter to which of your customers? Then, review your risks. If you think you’re going to learn a lot with this project, you have tremendous technical risk. If you know a lot about what you have to do, but the time is short, you have schedule risk. When you have both schedule and technical risk, consider using an agile lifecycle. If you have just schedule risk, consider a chunking lifecycle. For just technical risks, an iterative lifecycle. If you’re an experienced project manager, you can divide up the project into several phases, each with it’s own lifecycle (I once led a research phase using a spiral lifecycle, and then moved to design to schedule for the deliverable part of the project).

No lifecycle is completely perfect, but each has possibilities for your project. Consider which lifecycles are most appropriate for your use on this project.

Johanna Rothman consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. Johanna is the author of Manage It!’Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management’. She is the coauthor of the pragmatic Behind Closed Doors, Secrets of Great Management, and author of the highly acclaimed Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People. And, Johanna is a host and session leader at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference (http://www.ayeconference.com). You can see Johanna’s other writings at http://www.jrothman.com.

Article originally published at: http://jrothman.com/blog/mpd/2003/12/selecting-a-lifecycle.html.

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