Project Management Life Cycle: Key Phases and Best Practices

The Project Management Life Cycle is a sequential process that consists of distinct phases, each with specific objectives and deliverables. It provides a structured framework for managing projects from initiation to closure, ensuring a systematic approach to project execution. Project managers own this process and are responsible for the smooth progress of all actions inside the team.

A clear project management structure is essential to ensure project progress and success. You can use it as your systematic approach to planning, executing, and controlling your projects. Ultimately, it is the successful project outcome that you want to achieve. The project management lifecycle is the tool that enables you to reach this target.

What is the Project Management Life Cycle?

If we go deeper into the definition, you will walk around statements like:

• Ensuring clear objectives
• Effective resource allocation
• Stakeholder engagement throughout the project
• Meet the project goals.

Thus, the project management lifecycle serves as a roadmap for project managers to define objectives, allocate resources as needed, and engage stakeholders effectively when needed during the whole duration of the project. You are better prepared to adapt to changes, deliver successful outcomes, and navigate common challenges in project management.

What are the Benefits of Project Management Life Cycle?

The project management life cycle offers several key benefits that enhance project management and overall performance.

• You will gain structure in your working methods, which is the most important thing. Otherwise, you lead the project into chaos. It provides a systematic framework for managing projects, ensuring clear objectives, defined processes, and organized workflows from start to finish.
• By following the phases of the life cycle, project managers can allocate resources based on what each phase requires. This includes the necessary time duration of allocation, budget, and the number of people each phase requires.
• The life cycle allows you to manage potential risks as they happen along the line. Proactively identifying and mitigating risks throughout the project is the main direct result of such risk management actions. With risk management, it’s much easier to minimize disruptions and enhance the project’s ability to stay on track.
• A structured framework will bring quality control as a side effect to the team, as you can dedicate the concrete phase of the project specifically to quality control activities. Through monitoring and controlling phases, you can better predict that quality standards are met at every milestone. This is also how you can keep the quality of deliverables at an acceptable level during the project.
• The project management life cycle promotes effective communication with stakeholders, which means keeping them informed and engaged throughout the project. Such an approach naturally stimulates collaboration and support for successful project outcomes.
• Finally, by capturing lessons learned at each phase, project teams can improve processes over time. They will also avoid repeating the same mistakes all over again and enhance future project performance.

What are the Project Management Life Cycle Phases?

The project management life cycle consists of five major phases: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring & controlling, and closing.

Phase 1: Initiation

This is the starting point of your project delivery adventure, where you define the project at a high level and obtain approval from the stakeholders to proceed. You need to finalize the budget-related questions and define the size of the team and the skill set the team shall have as they progress.

The initiation phase often takes quite a long time, even if it’s not the most complex phase you will run into. However, the discussions with the stakeholders about the budget and when and how all the preconditions for the project will be met involve a lot of political topics. That’s the reason why this phase can take some considerable time. It might take even a few months, with several postponements of the original plan being part of the process.

Nevertheless, it is a very important part of the project management lifecycle that you can hardly skip.

Phase 2: Planning

In this phase, you meticulously plan every detail of your journey, from people and timelines to risks and budgets.

Key activities typically include defining the project scope, setting objectives for everyone involved, and capturing it in a project plan. This phase is crucial for laying the groundwork for the project and ensuring all stakeholders are aligned on the project goals and deliverables.

Phase 3: Execution

During the execution phase of the project management lifecycle, the project plan is put into action. You lead the team through the plan and actions.

Key activities in this phase include assigning tasks to team members, managing resources, monitoring progress, resolving issues, and communicating with stakeholders.

In parallel to that, the project team is working on the content of the project. That might include the following:

• Designing the solution and creating documentation for that.
• Developing the features and changes previously agreed upon and documented in the design.
• Performing various types of tests to verify the development was done correctly, e.g., unit, system, integration, and user acceptance tests.
• Preparing for deployment and release to production.

Your job as project manager is to always stay in close touch with the project team as they progress through those activities and to make sure they do not get stuck or run into issues that would prevent them from executing the production release as planned.

Phase 4: Monitoring and Controlling

As you progress through your quest, you watch your progress, making adjustments as needed to stay on course.

The project progress is tracked, performance is monitored, and any deviations from the plan are identified. Key activities in this phase include:

• Measuring performance against the project plan,
• Identifying variances,
• Implementing corrective actions,
• Managing changes,
• Ensuring that the project stays on track to meet its objectives.

Phase 5: Closing

Finally, you reach the end of your project, where you celebrate your victories and eventually learn from your experiences.

You close the project formally, and key activities include:

• Finalizing all project deliverables,
• Obtaining formal acceptance from stakeholders,
• Releasing project resources,
• Documenting lessons learned,
• Closing out contracts.

This phase is essential for ensuring the project is successfully concluded, and all loose ends are tied up.

Integrating Best Practices Across all Phases

You can apply some tried and proven principles to each of the phases of the project management lifecycle. They work best as a single collection if put into practice.

Standard Processes, Education, Tools and Templates

Establishing standardized processes and procedures that align with the industry should be among the first steps on your project. The sooner the people start acting within some defined boundaries, the more predictable and stable the team will become.

In the next step, it’s important to provide training and education to project team members on best practices associated with their roles and responsibilities. This will make sure the relevant knowledge not only stays in the team but, eventually, it will evolve into something even more advanced over time.

Once you have processes and knowledge, you also need tools and templates that everybody on the team will use as much as possible. Reusability is the key here to achieve consistency across all phases of the project.

Continuous Improvement and Quality Assurance

This is a tricky statement when talking about the usual project management lifecycle (not agile-driven teams), as continuous improvement is a process you usually associate with scrum or DevOps teams.

Nevertheless, in terms of non-agile projects, you shall still encourage a culture of continuous improvement by regularly reviewing and updating processes based on lessons learned and feedback from previous projects. It’s not that imminent activity, but rather something happening less often and valid for a longer period of time.

Improvement of processes goes hand in hand with evolving the level of quality of the project. In the end, all the processes and standards of the project shall have one ultimate goal, which is improving the overall quality of every single deliverable the team produces. If that’s not the case, your processes need a strong revisit.

Consistent Communication and Stakeholders Engagement

Consistent communication plays a crucial role in integrating best practices across all phases of the project management life cycle. It helps in keeping all team members aligned with project goals and objectives.

It also promotes collaboration among team members, enabling sharing of ideas, feedback, and lessons learned related to best practices. If you struggle to talk with your team consistently and openly, you can hardly expect the team to be open with you regarding their challenges. The opposite will be true – people in the team will hide the project’s issues and look for ways to swim through the problems with minimal notice.

Involve key stakeholders in decision-making processes and keep them informed about how best practices are being followed by the project. This helps a lot in reassuring them of the right project progress.

Variations in the Project Management Life Cycle

There are several variations in the project management life cycle, each with unique characteristics and typical features.

The model that you will choose will determine the ways of working you will need to evolve and improve. The good thing is that this choice is not deterministic in a way you can’t change it, ever. I would encourage you to experiment, especially if the current model does not fit your case well. You might lose a bit of time in terms of the team adaptation that will be necessary in such a case. But in the long run, it can actually be your best time saver.

Waterfall Model

In the waterfall model, the project progresses linearly through sequential phases, with each phase completed before moving on to the next. This approach is characterized by its structured and well-defined requirements at the beginning of the project.

That means the model is best suited for projects with clear and stable objectives, which hardly change over time the project is supposed to take.

Agile Model

Agile is an iterative and flexible approach where projects are divided into small increments or iterations. It emphasizes collaboration, adaptability, and continuous improvement as key properties of the project team.

Changes to the plan are welcome and to be incorporated throughout the project timeline based on often feedback and evolving requirements.

Scrum Model

Scrum is a specific agile framework focusing on delivering value iteratively and incrementally. It involves short, time-boxed iterations called sprints (usually taking 2 to 4 weeks), where cross-functional teams collaborate to deliver potentially shippable increments of the product.

Every sprint has its own sprint plan and sprint goals. In the best-case scenario, each sprint has its own production release. In fact, you might even look at the scrum like a waterfall within sprints. After each sprint iteration, you start over again with a fresh plan for the next sprint.

Kanban Model

Kanban is a visual management method that emphasizes workflow efficiency and continuous delivery. Work items are visualized on a Kanban board, with a focus on limiting work in progress and optimizing the flow.

You might look at it as a scrum project without sprints and sprint plans. You just take the work from the backlog as it goes based on priority. As a consequence, there is no point in time when you can be sure you have some meaningful, complete feature pack ready for deployment. It requires special attention to understand which topics, already completed by the team, form some bigger feature (or even epic).

Hybrid Model

Whether you like it or not, most of the time, your project might end up following some kind of hybrid model. Such a model contains a little bit of everything, depending on what the project team finds suitable under given circumstances.

Such hybrid approaches combine elements of different project management methodologies to tailor the life cycle to the specific needs of the project. For example, a project may use a combination of waterfall and agile practices to balance predictability.

I’m not really a fan of such hybrid models. But the truth is those models are the most common. Usually, the projects start with a high level of expectations and with the vision of how they will quickly transfer to fully agile project teams. However, over time, they will find switching people’s mindsets to agile delivery is not so simple. And so, to save the situation (and the project), they will just start mixing methodologies to make their life easier. It’s doable, but it will also lead you to a much longer adaptation and transformation road if your ultimate target is to fully transform into an agile project.

Ultimately, each variation in the project management life cycle offers unique benefits and challenges, and the choice of methodology depends on factors such as project complexity, stakeholder requirements, and organizational culture.

Tips For Effective Project Management

Effective project management involves the successful application of knowledge, skills, tools, and project management techniques to meet project requirements. It’s a guidance for achieving desired outcomes within constraints such as time, cost, scope, and quality.

Here are some of the key aspects of effective project management.

Clear Objectives and Communication

Make sure the project objectives are clear for the whole team and that they align with stakeholders’ expectations.

The objectives also help to form the project’s timeline with milestones to complete before the project can be finished. So, if the objectives aren’t clear, you can’t expect the project team to have a clear understanding of the project scope.

Establish open and transparent communication channels to keep stakeholders informed and aligned throughout the project life cycle.

Scope Management

The scope is also an aspect of the project lifecycle that requires a plan. This involves creating a detailed project scope management plan that outlines how the project scope will be defined, validated, and controlled.

The project scope includes the project’s deliverables, objectives, constraints, and assumptions. Most of the time, you want to break down the project scope into smaller, more manageable components for easier planning and control. Those are called Work Breakdown Structures (WBS).

Scope validation means ensuring all project deliverables are complete and meet the acceptance criteria.

Finally, you want to monitor the scope continually so that you can easily prevent scope breakage.

Risk Management

This term means proactively identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks to minimize potential disruptions in the project. You want to track risks and issues arising on the project and take proactive steps to remediate them.

Each risk shall have a proposed timeline for resolution, what will be the solution, and if the solution won’t materialize, what is the mitigation action plan.

Quality Management

When speaking about quality, you want to look at deliverables. A deliverable can be anything that is part of the project’s outcome. That includes documentation, standards the team is adhering to, processes the team executes, communication the team uses, and support you give to the stakeholders and users around the team.

Managing the quality level of your project is essential on all fronts. Combining them together will give the ultimate picture of how trustworthy and predictable your project is.

Stakeholder Engagement

You shall be proactive in keeping your stakeholders happy with what is happening in the team and during the project phases.

Seek their feedback, manage stakeholders’ expectations, and build relationships that can help you succeed with the project. It’s your mission to engage and connect all parties participating in the project.

What are the Popular Project Management Software available?

Popular project management software includes monday.com, Notion, ClickUp, Basecamp, and Trello, which are favored by beginners and small teams for ease of use. Asana, Smartsheet, Wrike, and Zoho Projects offer advanced features suitable for established businesses.

Is there any FREE Project Management Software Available?

Yes, OpenProject, nTask, Any.do, and Focalboard are some open-source and free project management software you can try today.

Final Words

The project management life cycle isn’t a walk through the garden of roses (in a cycle). More often, it is a wild and stressful ride, and dealing with various problems is business as usual for you. Your reward won’t be a well-working code or a piece of the system full of innovation.

You will simply need to accept that removing the problems out of the way for the sake of your project team’s well-being will be the highest reward you can achieve daily.

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