accomplished. For example, a health-awareness program can never completely achieve its goal (the public will never be totally aware of all health issues as a result of a health-awareness program), but one or more projects may accomplish specific results related to the program’s goal (such as a workshop on minimizing the risk of heart disease). Second, a program sometimes refers to a group of specified projects that achieve a common goal.
Describing the four phases of a project life cycle
Starting the project: This phase involves generating, evaluating, and framing the business need for the project and the general approach to performing it and agreeing to prepare a detailed project plan. Outputs from this phase may include approval to proceed to the next phase, documentation of the need for the project and rough estimates of time and resources to perform it (often included in a project charter), and an initial list of people who may be interested in, involved with, or affected by the project. This phase typically encompasses a set of project management process groups, collectively referred to as the Initiating processes.
Organizing and preparing: This phase involves developing a plan that specifies the desired results; the work to do; the time, cost, and other resources required; and a plan for how to address key project risks. Outputs from this phase may include a project plan that documents the intended project results and the time, resources, and supporting processes needed to create them. The project management process groups that support this phase are called planning processes.
Carrying out the work: This phase involves establishing the project team and the project support systems, performing the planned work, and monitoring and controlling performance to ensure adherence to the current plan. Outputs from this phase may include project results, project progress reports, and other communications. Executing processes is the general term for all those that are performed during this phase.
Closing the project: This phase involves assessing the project results, obtaining customer approvals, transitioning project team members to new assignments, closing financial accounts, and conducting a post-project evaluation. Outputs from this phase may include final, accepted, and approved project results and recommendations and suggestions for applying lessons learned from this project to similar efforts in the future.
For small projects, this entire life cycle can take just a few days. For larger projects, it can take many years! In fact, to allow for greater focus on key aspects and to make it easier to monitor and control the work, project managers often subdivide larger projects into separate phases, each of which is treated as a mini-project and passes through these four life cycle phases. No matter how simple or complex the project is, however, these four phases (start; plan; do; stop) are the same.
Some common, unplanned scenarios might include:
You may have to work on two (or more) project phases at the same time to meet tight deadlines. Working on the next phase before you complete the current one increases the risk that you may have to redo tasks, which may cause you to miss deadlines and spend more resources than you originally planned. If you choose this strategy, document and be sure people understand the potential risks and costs associated with it (see Chapter 10 for how to assess and manage risks).
Sometimes you learn by doing. Despite doing your best to assess feasibility and develop detailed plans, you may realize you can’t achieve what you thought you could. When this situation happens, you need to return to the earlier project phases and rethink them in light of the new information you’ve acquired.
Sometimes things change unexpectedly. Your initial feasibility and benefits assessments are sound, and your plan is detailed and realistic. However, certain key project team members leave the organization without warning during the project. Or a new technology emerges, and it’s more appropriate to use than the one in your original plans. Because ignoring these occurrences may seriously jeopardize your project’s success, you need to return to the earlier project phases and rethink them in light of these new realities.
Adopting a Principled Approach to Project Management
If you recall, we opened this chapter with mention of the PMBOK’s evolution since its inception. For most of the past 35 years, from PMBOK 1 through PMBOK 6, there have been a number of structural updates, like distinguishing between The Standard for Project Management and A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge rather than simply the body of knowledge for project management.
There have also been substantive updates, such as the introduction of project management processes to demonstrate the linkages between the various knowledge areas or the inclusion of Agile methodology as it became mainstream.
We think you’ll find that the recent changes — to add project management principles and project performance domains and forego formal life cycle phases and knowledge areas — are the most transformational of all the changes to date. Whether we refer to these topics and skills as knowledge areas or performance domains, processes or principles, the underlying motivation for this shift is to refocus project managers on the holistic outcomes their stakeholders expect rather than the specific deliverables, artifacts, and other tangibles that are, more accurately, components of the overall outcomes.
The 12 project management principles defined by PMI in PMBOK 7 that will help you deliver your project’s intended outcomes include: Stewardship, Team, Stakeholders, Value, Systems Thinking,
