Understanding project management lifecycle
Just as any product has a life, a project has a life too. Starting from the day it is conceived, the project stays until it is closed and finally a project team is dissolved. The stages in a project life cycle are actually easy to make out. They include initiation, planning, execution, monitoring & control, and lastly, closure. What you need to remember is what comes in each of these stages and what you are required to do in them. Here, we will cover each stage in depth including helping you get to that.
Initiation:
Initiation begins a project and it involves activities that are needed to understand, plan and justify the project such as business case study, feasibility study, and project scope definition. In this stage, you may be preparing a Project charter, Project Initiation Document (PID), and a business case. The PID itself would have details like project scope, deliverables, goals, constraints, business case, preliminary project plan, budget plan, project controls, contingency plan, and quality criteria for project deliverables. A typical PID document may have the following sections:- Document approval – Names of signatories with their sign are recorded
- Document Control – records version and file name
- Document modification history – records versions with their author name, description, and date of modification.
- Introduction – Covers background of project and purpose of document
- Project Definition – records project objectives, scope, exclusions, and constraints
- Approach – has details of project methodology, phases, and milestones
- Project organization – It includes the organizational structure and defines responsibilities and rights of project sponsor, steering committee, project team, and stakeholders
- Communications Plan – How project team would communicate with stakeholders?
- Quality Plan – Record quality related responsibilities such as quality assurance, quality log, and document version control procedure
- Project plan – Contains description of products to be delivered and gives the brief of the project budget
- Project Control – Processes that are used for establishing control such as monitoring and reporting
- Risk Management – Major project risks are identified.
Project Planning:
A project plan is written to guide a project team throughout the project. Thus, a plan would include details like resource requirements, quality needs, stakeholder communication, project scope, project cost, project schedule, supplier management, quality, communications, and risk management. In this phase, a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is prepared that records all the necessary tasks to be completed at the granular level. A WBS identifies activities that can be completed individually without an overlap with other. A typical WBS looks like the one given below: 1.0 Planning 1.1 Requirement identification 1.1.1 Requirement gathering 1.1.2 Validation 1.2 Project plan Development 1.2.1 Scope 1.2.2 Schedule 1.2.3 Budget 2.0 Design and development 2.1 Design 2.1.1 Selection 2.1.1.1 Interface 2.1.1.2 Modules 2.1.1.2.1 Calendaring 2.1.1.2.2 Reporting 2.1.1.2.3 ……. Although, it is prepared with a sense of some sequence but it may not always define one and there could be overlaps in times if not the tasks. Thus, in the planning stage, you can take help of other visual tools such as sequence diagram, network diagram, critical path diagram, entity relationship diagrams and so on. These diagrams help you identify resources, connection between different entities of your project, and understand the sequence in which the activities have to be completed. Software like Microsoft Project can help you create these diagrams automatically after you create a WBS on it with resources and durations allocated to tasks. The software would act as a scheduling tool for you, which would create a full schedule model identifying project activities, resources, relationships, and duration presented in different ways. An advanced scheduling tool takes project schedule, scope statement, activity resource requirements, staff assignments, risk register, resource calendars, activity list and their attributes as inputs and delivers schedule, network diagram, milestone chart, Gantt chart, and schedule baseline as output.Project Execution:
Execution involves ensuring that deliverables are completed as per the project plan. For this, appropriate resource allocation is done so that assigned tasks are completed on time. You need to assure that resources are carefully selected and are kept focused on tasks assigned. In PRINCE 2 methodology, project execution and project monitoring and control are often considered in a single phase, as they cannot be separated technically but have to go together. In execution, activities are performed and measured at the same time, which is a part of monitoring. Reports are prepared based on these measures and then, based on the analysis of these reports, control measures are applied.Monitoring & Control:
This goes hand in hand with the project execution and involves monitoring of the tasks that are executed so that the project manager can ensure that deliverables are completed as planned and any variation is reported. At this point, you can establish control over a project and prevent issues like scope creep and cost overrun. Key performance indicators can be used for measuring progress and identifying any variations that can cause risks to the project. This phase works on all the key components of the project plan including time, risk, cost, quality, procurement, communications, and change management. Some common metrics are used on almost all projects for monitoring such as:- Schedule Deviation – Status can be reported as “not started” (0% completed), in progress, or completed (100% done). Metrics that can be used to capture schedule deviation include planned starts vs actual starts, planned completed vs actual completed, planned hour’s vs actual hours, number of tasks completed, and number of tasks outstanding.
- Cost – Metrics can include deviation from expenditure plan, planned vs actual budget, and increase/decrease in the cost.
- Project Changes – Metrics can include the count of total change requests, requests approved, requests rejected, and those undecided.
- Project Issues – Metrics can include the count of total issues, issues closed, and issues pending.
Project Closure:
This is the last stage of the project in which the deliverables are finally offered to the project owners or client. This involves documentation of the project closure documents and lessons learned from the project. While preparing for closure, you may refer to the following checklist to ensure that all that is required is done:- All deliverables met and submitted to stakeholders
- All documents are signed by respective authorities and organized well
- All invoices have been paid off to suppliers
- All closure reports have been prepared and finalized
- All project resources are compensated and released
