The Project Life Cycle and IT Development

The project live cycle is a collection of logical stages or phases that maps the life of project its beginning to its end in order to define, build, and deliver the product of project that is, the information system. Each phase should provide one or more deliverables. A deliverables is a tangible and verifiable product of work. Deliverables at the end of each phase also provide tangible benefits throughout the project and serve to define the work and resources needed for each phase.

Define Project Goal

Define the project overall goal should be the first step of the project. This goal should focus on providing business value to the organizations. A well defined goal gives the project team a clear focus and drives the other project. In addition, most project seem to share the following characteristic:

1. The effort, in terms of cost and staffing levels, is low at the start of the project, but then increases as the project work being done, and decrease at the end as the project is completed.
2. Risk and uncertainty are the highest at the start of a project. Once goal of the project is defined and the project progress, the probability of success should increase.
3. The ability for stakeholder to influence the scope and cost of the project is highest at the beginning of the project. The cost of changing the scope and correcting errors becomes more expensive as the project progress.

Plan Project.

In addition, the deliverables, tasks, resources, and time to complete each must be defined for each phase of the project. The initial plan, called a baseline plan, defines, the agreed upon scope, schedule, and budget and is used as a tool a gauge the project performance throughout life cycle.

Execute Project Plan.

After the project goal and plan have been define, it’s time to put the plan into action. As work on the project progress, scope, schedule, budget, and people must be actively managed to ensure that the project achieves its goal. The project progress must be documented and compared to the project baseline plan. In additions, performance must be communicated to all of the project stakeholders. At the end of this phase, the project team implements or delivers a completed product organizations.

Close Project

As mentioned previously, a project should have a definite beginning and end. The closing phase of a project ensures that all of the work is completed as planned and as agreed to by the project team and sponsor. Therefore, there should be some kind of formal acknowledge by the sponsor that they will accept the product delivery. This closer is often capped with a final project report and presentation to the client that document that all promised deliverables have been completed as specified.

Evaluate Project

Sometime value of an IT project is not readily known when the system is implemented. However, the project can be evaluated in other ways as well. The project team should document its experience in terms of lessons learned those things that it would do the same and those things it would do differently on the next project, based on its current project experienced. This post mortem should be documented, stored electronically, and shared throughout the organizations.

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