The Project Life Cycle

August 11, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Lifecycle Phases, Project Management for Beginners

The Project Life Cycle (#2 in the Hut A Quick Guide to Project Management)
By Manjeet Singh

This hut assumes that your project has already been selected, and that a Project Charter has been produced. A Project Charter is generally a document that provides a short description of the project and designates the Project Manager. Sometimes a commercial contract also leads to the initiation of project especially in firms specialized in providing professional/consulting services.

A project life cycle typically has the following processes as defined by the Project Management Institute (PMI):

Project Life Cycle

The Project Life Cycle Chart
Initiating

During the initiating process, you will refine the project goals, review the expectations of all stakeholders, and determine assumptions and risks in the project. You will also start project team selection — if the project team has been imposed, then you need to familiarize yourself with their skill set and understand their roles in the project. At the end of this phase you will produce a Statement of Work (SOW), which is a document that provides a description of the services or products that need to be produced by the project.

Planning

During the planning process, you will detail the project in terms of its outcome, team members’ roles and responsibilities, schedules, resources, scope and costs. At the end of this phase, you will produce a project management plan, which is a document that details how your project will be executed, monitored and controlled, and closed. Such a document also contains a refined project scope, and is used as the project baseline.

Executing

During the executing process, you apply your project management plan. In other words you direct your team so that it performs the work to produce the deliverables as detailed in the plan. The executing process also involves implementing approved changes and corrective actions.

Controlling and monitoring

During the controlling and monitoring process, you supervise project activities to ensure that they do not deviate from the initial plan and scope. When this happens, you will use a change control procedure to approve and reject change requests, and update the project plan/scope accordingly. The controlling and monitoring phase also involves getting approval and signoff for project deliverables.

Closing

During the closing process, you formally accept the deliverables and shut down the project or its phases. You will also review the project and its results with your team and other stakeholders of the project. At the end of the project you will produce a formal project closure document, and a project evaluation report.

Next in the Hut A Quick Guide to Project Management:

Project Initiating Process

Previously in the Hut A Quick Guide to Project Management:

Defining What a Project Is

Manjeet Singh has over 17 years of experience acquired in a wide variety of industries with a focus on project and program management at Software Makers and Global IT Services companies throughout the world. Manjeet has an Executive MBA from the HEC Management School, and is the author of the website www.projectminds.com that provides a free guide to project management, and offers other project management-related resources.

Share this article:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • blogmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • TwitThis
  • Yahoo! Buzz

Related Articles

2 people have left comments

[...] The Project Life Cycle [...]

Defining What a Project Is - PM Hut wrote on August 11, 2008 - 10:43 am | Visit Link

[...] The Project Life Cycle [...]

Project Initiating Process - PM Hut wrote on August 19, 2008 - 7:12 am | Visit Link

feel free to leave a comment

Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

All fields marked with " * " are required.

The Stevens Enterprise Project Management Master's Program

Project Management Categories