Project Management Life Cycle

Illustration: Project Management Life Cycle

We all know that IT projects don't just happen. They usually start with an idea that gets socialized internally, until somebody decides it is interesting enough to write a business case, justifying why the idea might be good for the Enterprise. The Project Management Life Cycle (PMLC) walks the reader, from left to right, through all the components of a project. It assumes the project has been instantiated and has executive sponsorship. Other activities prior to the project itself include the Opportunity Assessment, a Cost/Benefit Analysis, and likely ROI and TCO studies.

The PMLC illustration above is designed to show three things at each stage: the roles that contribute to the project, their responsibility and their deliverable. Starting on the left, the Stakeholders typically sit on a Steering committee, and provide budgetary approvals for the project.

The project is run by the Project Manager, who is responsible for budget, timeline & resources. They usually draft the Project Charter, which defines the objectives and scope of the project. They are responsible for reporting back to, and taking direction from the steering committee. It is their responsibility to deliver the project to successful completion.

The Business Analyst does a lot of leg-work, dealing with the stakeholders to understand requirements, both functional and non-functional. They will take raw data they have collected, and produce information which is valuable to the project, and consumable by all members of the project team.

Now that you have a general idea of the flow, you can interpret the rest of the illustration for yourself. Other information that will later become key is called the RACI. It is an artifact that names all of the roles (as seen in the illustration), and determines who is Responsible, who is Accountable, who is Consulted and who is Informed when a project decision has to be made.

This is a general look at how IT projects move through their life cycle. In a future post, I'll overlay the CLAP Framework, to pull together all of the concepts into a single view.

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