When people discuss the merits of project management, they often talk, perhaps sometimes unknowingly, in terms of the ‘Project Management Lifecycle’ and the ‘Project Lifecycle’.
Often though, these terms get confused or inter-twined, when a person speaks of one, they mean another or, elements of one lifecycle are mistakenly used in the other. Perhaps the use of the word lifecycle is the fuel for the confusion, but that’s the word we use in many walks of human endeavour.
The Project Management Lifecycle is the discipline, within an organisation, that governs how a project is selected, initiated, executed, managed and closed. These are always the same, whichever approach you decide to implement.
The lifecycle in project management is, of a fashion, a lifecycle. There are elements such as planning, for example, that are repeated as things progress in an iterative nature. This lifecycle will be started afresh and repeated for each new project initiative that is undertaken.
For completeness, you need to consider the pre-project and post-project periods to projects. These determine what needs to happen before you start a project and what happens once the project has been completed. For example, if you’re building a house, you want to make sure that it is built in an area that somebody will buy, there is a market for it and that this house doesn’t use funds that could be used better elsewhere – pre-project. You also then want to make sure that the house can be lived in by its occupants happily, without obstruction in the way the house build was intended – post-project.
The Project Lifecycle, however, is much more about the process by which you get things done to deliver a projects outcome. For example, the waterfall method is a lifecycle and is often referred to in software as the Systems Development Lifecycle (SDLC). This is a sequence of staged ‘packages of work’, where you might design, then build, then test and then deliver. There are times, of course, where you may have to go back to a previous stage. For example, if the build of a block of flats was going wrong, and there was a problem with the design, you would stop the build cycle and go back to the design stage.
The project lifecycle you choose will be dependent on what it is you’re trying to deliver. For example, the project lifecycle will be different for building a car, or to build a house or to create new software.
The word ‘lifecycle’, in this case is a bit of a misnomer, in that it’s not particularly cyclical. The project lifecycle is more a sequence of phases that are normally commenced and completed in series, though these stages may also overlap.
Though, it is fair to say that agile, due to its incremental and cyclical nature of commencing work, recognising value, and starting again with the next portion of work, is a lifecycle.
A further point of confusion worth mentioning is the Product Management Lifecycle. This lifecycle manages the complete life of a product from inception to service retirement and covers the creation, deployment, service maintenance and finally its removal from active service. In the life of a successful product, there may well be many projects that are executed in order to deliver the original product, upgrades and its replacements.
Hopefully, that has helped to clear up the difference between the lifecycles. What are you thoughts? Please comment below.
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