What Are the Project Life Cycle Phases?
There are 4 project life cycle phases: initiation, planning, execution, and closure.
And if you monitor each, you can systematize them and understand where there’s room for improvement. Especially if you review them separately, instead of just treating all the phases as one big project.
1. Initiation in the Project Life Cycle
In the project initiation phase, you’re setting the foundations for later success.
No other aspect of communication means as much as the communication you’ll experience at the very beginning.
Again, your goal here is to systematize how you process the initial information and make sure you’re always getting the information you need.
The first step is defining the project through:
- Identifying a need or a problem that the project will solve
- Identifying opportunities you can use to solve the problem
- Understanding whether the project is feasible and will solve the problem
- Defining the scope of the project and the deliverables
- Identifying the stakeholders and defining the necessary resources.
After fulfilling these requirements, you’ll be able to create a project charter containing all the information on purposes, objectives, resources, and other aspects.
The analysis you conduct in this phase of the project life cycle will help you understand how your project will be progressing in the future, as well as organize and assemble all the necessary people and resources.
2. Project Planning
In this part of the project management life cycle, you:
- Set a budget and estimate a timeframe
- Establish milestones
- Perform a risk analysis
- Define tasks and responsibilities
- Create a workflow.
You should look at this phase both strategically and practically.
Using a solution that leverages project management templates is a great way to get your projects up and running quickly and with the right amount of process.
Try to understand how each task leads to the ultimate goal of solving the problem and keep in mind that the tasks should be practical and easy to accomplish.
The most important part of project planning as a stage is definitely a risk analysis which can help you identify any potential roadblocks.
3. Project Management Life Cycle: Execution
Now that you’ve set everything up correctly, it’s time to bring the team on board and get to work!
The execution phase is the one where communication can really make or break a project.
During this phase, you should communicate both with your team to make sure they are advancing as predicted, and the stakeholders to keep them updated.
You should also establish key performance metrics for project tracking. This way, you’ll be able to see how everything’s going and adjust if needed.
How to Monitor Project Performance?
If you’re already using Microsoft 365, you can just get an upgrade to project management with Project Central.
Your standard tool becomes more comprehensive, without becoming complicated.
With Project Central, you’ll be able to:
- Visually manage your project
- Monitor the project status
- Track all the metrics you care about
- Keep everyone on the same page.
Other solutions, like the one from our friends at BrightWork 365 let youleverage Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform to help you organize project requests, manage projects, and track portfolios.
In addition to communication, you’ll also have one big c to think of – coordination. You should monitor the workflow and the budget.
4. (It’s Time for) Closure!
Finally, when the project is done, it’s time to evaluate the success of it, the performance of your team, and write a report.
You can use this stage to say “thank God it’s over,” or you can use it to understand how you can be even better in the future.
Ideally, you want to look at both how satisfied the clients are, and how satisfied your team members are.
You shouldn’t just guess and try to remember if a team member met their goals in time.
Not when you can use a tool like Project Central and make sure you’re getting all the information you need.
And when you can measure it, you can also improve it.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2019, and has been updated for accuracy, freshness, and comprehensiveness.
