Project Life Cycles and Phase Gates

In order to deliver projects and programs there are many different methods and what we call project life cycles, which are ways of working within a project that we can use to deliver these things.

Predictive Life Cycle

First of all we’ve got our Predictive life cycle, which is traditionally called waterfall, where we think about all the scope and the requirements upfront then we go away for a certain period of time and make it all happen within a project without necessarily getting too much feedback, and then we deliver in one big bang at the end. That’s our predictive lifecycle – we’re predicting all of the things upfront that a customer might want and that might happen in a project.

Iterative Life Cycle

We have our iterative life cycle and incremental life cycle, which actually combine to become Agile in the end. We’re iterating towards a final product but we’re gathering feedback and changing as we go, usually in two to four week cycles or iterations. We’re gathering that feedback, putting it back into our plan, then gathering that feedback again and putting it back into the plan again, but we’re still delivering in one big bang.

Incremental Life Cycle

Incremental is when we’re delivering increments that a customer can see, feel and touch. Based on that they’re actually using that feature in the real world, and then at the end they still get their full final product as well. We do this to get better and more feedback from our customer delivering those features to a customer as we’re going along.

Adaptive Life Cycles

Second to last is adaptive life cycles so these are our Agile agile life cycles and these are usually iterative and incremental. Detailed scope can be defined and approved before the start of each iteration of two to four weeks instead of doing the whole project in a predictive manner – we’re only looking at shorter life cycles. We we don’t need to predict the whole thing and we can change as we’re going along.

Hybrid Life Cycles

Hybrid is just a combination of either predictive or an agile life cycle or an adaptive life cycle where we might have all of our scope upfront but we’re using agile methodologies like Kanban to manage that scope and what should go from “in progress” or the “backlog” to “done”. Or we might be using scrum where we’re having daily stand-ups, just short sharp meetings that give us an update on where everything is up to. These are the combinations that you can have in your project life cycles.

Just as there are multiple different ways of managing a project there are different phase gates we can use as we’re going along. These can be matched up to any of those project life cycles where we’ve got iterations, and each of those iterations or a few different iterations could match up to be one of these phase gates at the end where we are delivering our feasibility study at the beginning for example to see if it’s worth kicking off a project, then we’re delivering our customer requirements (these are just ideas) you might have more phase gates or things that you need to deliver or features that you’d need to deliver as part of your project as you go along. Potentially we’re building all these things, testing them and transitioning them back to the business or back to the operations of the business.

Managing Life Cycles With Project Documents 

That phase gate is the end of a phase and a project’s performance is benchmarked to documents such as the project business case which is up here in the beginning documents. The Project Charter kicks off a project, the project management plan combines all the things like risk, scope, schedule, quality, communications, and stakeholders into one project management plan that you use to monitor and control and execute on the project as you’re going along.

Lastly how do we know that we we’ve met our requirements? It’s the benefits management plan. What are the benefits that we’re delivering and how do we know we’ve met them, or what are we aiming for once this project has been delivered. Is it an increase in customer revenue? Is it an increase in this particular product’s performance? We’re wanting to measure it.

– David McLachlan