Project Life Cycle

Defining

Planning

Executing

Delivering / controlling

DEFINING A PROJECT
Activities

Specifications of project are defined

Project objectives are estabilished

Scope estabilished

Tasks defined

Stake holders/Teams are formed

Major responsibilities are assigned

Prepare for tradeoffs

Key Skills
Task Analysis
Cost benefit analysis of options

Planning Stage
Plans are made to determine what the project will entail
When it will be scheduled- timeframes
Major and minor milestones
Cost calculations
Teams and formed
Resource requirements
Further refinement of scope

Key Skills
Process Analysis
Team building
Negotiating
Delegating
Communicating

Project Plan
As the saying has it, "If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail."

A document that clearly outlines the project milestones and major

activities required to implement your project.
The project plan also needs to be created at the beginning of the project
Includes the date each milestone or major activity is to be completed,
and the owner of each.
One may not know all of the major activities required to implement your
project in the beginning,
it is important that you create a draft of the activities you think may need
to be tracked via a formal document.
The Work breakdown structure needs to be made
The list of all the possible tasks and subtasks
The logical sequence of these and mile stones

What is a work breakdown structure?

A work breakdown structure is a key project deliverable that
organizes the teams work into manageable sections.
The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) defines the
work breakdown structure as a deliverable oriented hierarchical
decomposition of the work to be executed by the project team.
The work breakdown structure visually defines the scope into
manageable chunks that a project team can understand, as each
level of the work breakdown structure provides further definition and
detail.
A work breakdown structure starts with the project as the top level
deliverable and is further decomposed into sub-deliverables

Project Plan contd..

A few key items to include in the timeline are:
A unique ID that your team can reference when giving an update
The name of the task
When the task should start
When the task should finish
The actual date the task was completed
Any tasks that need to happen before other tasks can begin
The owner of the task
Percent complete of each task
You or the Project Sponsor you represent may decide to track or maintain
more than what has been outlined above in your project plan. This is
absolutely fine. These are just the items I have found to be vital, and a good
foundation to build upon.

Best Practices
Take some time and really think through what you know about the
objective of your project.

Look at some historical data from similar projects. You can even
have a few informal meetings with knowledgeable individuals you
can use as a sounding board to make sure you aren't completely off
base. You'll be surprised how good a draft you can develop if you put
in a little effort.

With this draft you will be able to speak with subject matter experts
(SMEs) and stakeholders to flesh out the project plan. If you don't
make some level of effort to develop a rough draft, you may give a
bad impression which will make it harder for you to obtain the
support of the persons you need to implement the project.

After you have fleshed out your draft with your core team, and some
other SMEs that may not be a part of your team, you should give the
document a baseline status. Your timeline / project plan should not
undergo many edits, if any, after it achieves baseline status.

EXECUTING
Executing the plan
Involves monitoring the schedules, cost and specifications
Holding of weekly reviews
Managing contigencies, delays, forecasting future progress
Making necessary changes

Key Skills
Supervising
Delegating
Communicating
Leading and Motivating
Problem solving
Conflict management

Documents
Reports
Review meetings

Delivering/Closing/ Handing over

Completion activities include
Signoff by client

Training of personnel

Documentation

Transfering of documents

Redeploying resources

WHY PROJECTS FAIL

Lesson #1Project Vision, Mission, and
Objectives
Christenson and Walker (2004), as well as Shimizu
and Hitt
(2004), purport that the development and
articulation of a
project vision are key to successful project
outcomes.

it is the responsibility of senior

management to maintain the vision.

Lesson #2Project
Sponsorship/ Top leadership
It is vitally important to the
success of a project to have a
project champion or sponsor

Further, the project sponsor

must have the management span,
appropriate knowledge,
and organizational authority to
harmonize the discordant
voices.

Lesson #2Project Sponsorship/

Top leadership contd..
An effective project sponsor who believes that the project is
both viable and necessary is essential to the success of any
organizational project.This sponsor must also be willing to
use the authority vested in him or her to build a coalition of
support among the various project stakeholders (Hosking,
2005).

Adequate project
sponsorship is important in relatively simple projects, so it is
even more of a necessity in complex projects, such as
defense
acquisition projects (Hosking).

Lesson #3Project Planning

A third lesson learned was in the area of total
project planning. It has been stated that good
upfront planning may reduce the number of
changes required (Kerzner, 2003).
A corollary to this is that effective project execution
requires that the number of subsequent changes be
minimized if effective project planning is done on
the frond end.
It is impossible to perform effective project planning
unless the project vision, mission, and all of the
project requirements are taken into account at the
beginning of the project
(Christenson & Walker, 2004; Kerzner, 2003).

Lesson #4Project Specifications

Quality information is much more

likely to lead to successful project management outc
rather than the inclusion of unrealistic information