The project life cycle

So the project initial documentation will give you the key objectives or the information about the key objectives of the project. It gives you the information about like start dates and the end dates, how much funding do we require, who are the key stakeholders, such as the project Managers, the project sponsors. It should also be highlighting the stakeholder analysis element in it but not in depth because it will be covered later on in the second stage. The second stage which gives us slightly more in depth understanding of it. In the project planning we actually follow the work breakdown structure.

There are many tools we can use, I’ve mentioned there’s like a GANTT chart there, there would also be a flow chart diagram which will highlight the number of activities which you require to complete this job and the milestones which we have to achieve within those activities. It could then further be developed on the basis of how much resources or funding do we require for each task and then we also need to be looking at redistribution information kind of thing to make sure the projects risks are eliminated throughout the process. If you can’t eliminate them we need to look at how do we point against them. So the third stage which is the project launching stage or execution.

So, for example, we can measure them by looking at the KPI’s, the key performance indicators. We could also be looking at the qualities of the project against the outcome. So what we have achieved so far, are they meeting the customer’s expectations or is there any gap. If there is any gap we would need to make a control against it. We can also be measuring them on the basis of the performances. Again we will cover that in the coming weeks where we talk what value we learnt, analysis kind of stuff, so you would be able to think about what we have expected, have we delivered that, or if there is any gap in between.

The final stage is the project closure stage. In this particular activity we measure our deliverables, have we met them and what lesson learned will also be a part of this stage and that’s called project reporting and that’s the final stage in the project. You know, its to make sure what we agreed upon in terms of the customer’s expectations, have we delivered them in time, on cost and perhaps the quality as well.

So we want to make sure that we deliver our projects, our projects on time without compromising on cost or quality and then it will also lead us to the further extension to it, what lessons are learned from this stage and if we have to do a similar project in the future what we could do in order to enhance our production.