The series of phases that a project passes through from its start to its completion. Project teams use a certain development approach, depending on the nature of the project and its deliverable(s), to manage the life cycle of the project. Common development approaches are predictive (waterfall), adaptive (agile), and hybrid.
In the previous post, a project was defined as: a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result. Projects have a beginning and an end to the project work or a phase of the project work.
Projects come in many shapes and there’s a variety of ways to undertake them. When a project’s deliverable has uncertain requirements and complexity, project teams can opt to explore the requirements using iterative and/or incremental project life cycles to adapt to changes more easily and avoid the risk of wasted work, rework, and having to change approach – which is costly and time consuming.
Iterative and incremental life cycles help project teams get feedback quickly and verify their work to understand the true customer requirements. This can likely be done faster and more accurately than with heavily planned, static documentation from a predictive life cycle.
This is not to poo-poo on the predictive (waterfall) approach. When a project has a well-defined scope, schedule, and cost, the project team can more heavily plan up front and reduce uncertainty as the project moves forward. A predictive approach can work quite nicely, especially if there are templates and documentation from previous, similar projects.
Want to learn more about Project Management? See my Project MGMT publication for these 30 key PM topics:
Projects, lifecycle, management, manager, methodologies, the triangle, stakeholders, deliverable, team, charter, scope, budget, schedule, planning, baselining, milestones, dependencies, resources, risk, procurement, communication, ceremonies, integration, backlog, whiteboard, closure, software tools, office(r), code of ethics, body of knowledge
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