What Is The Project Life Cycle: The 5 Phases Explained
A Tale of Five Phases: Projects have a definitive lifespan, during which they undergo the 5 phases of the project life cycle: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, and closure.
Tools of the Trade: By equipping yourself with the appropriate project management software, you can significantly improve your ability to manage the 5 phases and deliver the project successfully.
A Clear Roadmap: Following the project life cycle ensures that you as the project manager know the key steps that need to be taken at any point in the project to keep it on track and moving forward.
Dealing With Uncertainty: No matter how much ambiguity or uncertainty you have to deal with (or what kind of crazy left turns the project takes), you have a reliable structure to go back to and regroup on.
All projects are temporary efforts with a beginning and end. They go through the same five project management steps: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, and closure. When its value has been delivered, the project ceases to be. This is known as the project life cycle.
I'm going to explore each phase of the life cycle and how you can apply it to your projects. A key aspect of successfully managing projects within the project life cycle is being equipped with the right project management software tools that can support each phase of the project.
What Is The Project Life Cycle?
The project life cycle is the phases of a project that are necessary for the effective delivery of that project. It dictates the order of processes and phases a project goes through as it's completed, and describes the high-level workflow of the project.
The PMI (Project Management Institute) has defined these five project management process groups, or project management phases, which come together to form the project life cycle.
- Project Initiation
- Project Planning
- Project Execution
- Project Monitoring & Controlling
- Project Closure
The PMI took what’s really common sense and called it the project life cycle. This is the de facto standard for project delivery, which you can find in PMI's 370 page 7th edition of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). (It's worth noting the life cycle for projects following agile methodologies like Scrum can be different.)
It’s a really long, and to be honest, deathly boring read, so here’s a condensed breakdown of each project management step, which contains all the important takeaways.
The 5 Phases of The Project Life Cycle
Below, I go into each of the life cycle stages and explain what happens in each of the 5 phases of project management.
1. Project Initiation Phase
Initiation is the first phase of the project life cycle, and it involves doing a project kickoff meeting with your team and with the client and getting their commitment to start the project.
You bring together all of the available information to define the project’s scope, cost, and resources. The goal of the initiation phase is to take the (sometimes) loose brief of a project and understand what the project needs to do and achieve in order to be successful.
That usually necessitates identifying the project stakeholders and making sure they all share the same perception of what the project is and the specific business case—the problem that the project is trying to solve.
It’s during this project initiation phase that you also decide whether delivering the business case is feasible. As a project manager, you will need to conduct adequate proof-of-concept research to determine the project goals and then propose a solution to achieve them.
Key Steps During Project Initiation
- Make a project charter: What is the vision, objective, and goal of this project?
- Identify the high-level scope and deliverables: What is the product or service that needs to be provided?
- Conduct a feasibility study: What is the primary problem and its possible solutions?
- Ballpark the high-level cost and create a business case: What are the costs and benefits of the solution?
- Identify stakeholders: Who are the people this project affects, how does it affect them, and what are their needs?
For PRINCE2 or PMI methodologies, the above is typically summed up in a Project Initiation Document (PID), but in an agency, it's usually captured in an initial statement of work (SoW).
2. Project Planning Phase
After receiving approval to proceed in the initiation phase, you can begin project planning, typically using a Gantt chart tool.
Planning is where you define all the work to be done and create the roadmap that you'll follow for the remainder of the project. You'll figure out how you’re going to perform the project and answer these questions:
- What exactly are we going to do?
- How are we going to do it?
- When are we going to do it?
- How will we know when we’re done?
During this project management step, you have to decide how you and your team will attain the goals of the project. It’s worth evaluating those goals with three criteria: what’s possible, passionate, and pervasive?
- Possible: Strive for something that is achievable. Ask yourself, does this solution match the budget? Does my team have the ability to do this? Do we have enough time? Setting unrealistic goals will set you up for failure.
- Passionate: Projects are tough, so you want a team that is emotionally engaged in the project. Ask yourself, can your team be passionate about this project? Is it something that can bring them together to collaborate and achieve the same goal? Even though it's their job to do what you tell them, no one wants to invest into something they don’t find worthwhile.
- Pervasive: Does this have the potential to become a ground-breaking success? Is it a complete solution to the problem that was given to you or is it just a band-aid solution? Does it have the potential to be improved on, developed, and to become a permanent way of working?
I like this 3 Ps lens for goals, but you might also be familiar with the principle of setting CLEAR goals: collaborative, limited, emotional, appreciable, and refinable.
The planning phase results in a project plan that outlines the project activities, tasks, dependencies, timeframe, and costs. It’s also prudent to develop a plan for resources, quality, risks, acceptance criteria, communication, and procurement.
Key Steps For Project Planning
- Create a project management plan: Identify the phases, activities, constraints, and project schedule, and create a project timeline with a work breakdown structure (WBS) and Gantt chart.
- Create a financial plan: Create a project budget and cost estimate, and a plan for allocating budget across resources and departments
- Create a resource plan: Build a great team and recruit and schedule the resources needed for the project in your resource management software
- Create a quality plan: Set your quality targets and measures
- Create a risk plan: Identify the possible risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies; assign an owner; and develop a mitigation plan for how you will avoid or overcome them
- Create an acceptance plan: Assign criteria for what constitutes ‘done’ and ‘delivered’
- Create a communication plan: List your stakeholders and plan the communication cadence in your project communications tool
- Create a procurement plan: Find any third-party suppliers that are required and agree on terms
3. Project Execution Phase
This is the part of the project life cycle where you finally get to execute on your awesome project plan. You bring your resources onboard, brief them, set the ground rules, and introduce them to one another. After that, everyone jumps in to perform the work identified in the plan. Easy peasy (in theory).
As the project manager, you shift from talking about a project and creating documentation to getting the green light to proceed with the execution phase. Now, you’re leading the team and managing them toward delivery. You’ll spend your time in briefings, meetings, and reviews, and keep the project on track as it moves through the rest of the project cycle.
Key Steps For Project Execution
- Team leadership: Cast a vision for success and enable the team to deliver on it
- Create tasks: Clearly define what needs to be done and the criteria for each project task
- Task briefing: Ensure the team is clear about what they need to do, and when they need to do it by
- Client management: Work with the client to ensure deliverables are acceptable
- Communications: Ensure you’re informing and updating the right people at the right time through the right channel
4. Project Monitoring & Controlling Phase
This project management step involves reporting on performance, monitoring, and controlling the project. (Our project status report roadmap guides you through the entire reporting process, which most software tools will let you automate, to some degree.)
That means ensuring the project is going according to plan, and if it isn’t, controlling it by working out solutions to get it back on track. You’ll be monitoring and controlling a project in some way throughout all of the project life cycle phases.
First, that means capturing the data (usually derived from timesheets and reports in your project management software) to track progress effectively against the original plan.
Second, you'll take the data and compare it to overall project progress, milestone and task completion, budget spend, and time allocated in the original plan. By comparing the actuals against the plan, you can establish whether or not you’re hitting the objectives for timeline, cost, quality, and success metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs).
And when you realize that things aren’t quite going to plan (they rarely do), you'll need to figure out how to pivot so you can still deliver something the client is happy with and meet the budget, timeline, and quality constraints.
Key Steps For Project Monitoring And Controlling
- Cost & time management: Review timesheets and expenses to record, control, and track against the project’s budget, timeline, and tasks
- Quality management: Reviewing project deliverables and ensuring they meet the defined acceptance criteria
- Risk management: Monitor, control, manage, and mitigate potential risks and issues
- Acceptance management: Conduct user acceptance testing and create a review system for ensuring that all deliverables meet the needs of the client
- Change management: When the project doesn’t go to plan, managing the process of acceptable changes to ensure the client is happy with necessary changes
5. Project Closure Phase
In the closing phase of the project life cycle, your project is essentially over and your job as a project manager comes to a close. But the project’s not over yet.
During this project closing step, hold a post-project review meeting or post-mortem to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the project and team, what went wrong or didn’t go so well, and how to improve for future projects.
This can be one of the most rewarding stages of project management, as it’s a great opportunity to recognize and acknowledge valuable team members and celebrate successes.
Key Steps For Project Closure
- Project performance analysis: This is an evaluation of how well the project was managed, and whether the initial estimates of costs and benefits were accurate. Were there unforeseen risks? What issues arose and how well were they dealt with? Was the project plan changed, and how?
- Team analysis: Did everyone do what they were assigned to do? Were they passionate and motivated ? Did they stay thorough and accountable? Was communication within the project team healthy and constructive?
- Project closure: Complete the tasks needed to bring the project to an official end. This includes closing supplier agreements, signing off contracts, and handing in all the necessary project documentation.
- Post-implementation review: Write down a formal analysis of successes and failure, resulting lessons learned, and suggestions for the future. At the end of every successful project, you will learn that room for improvement always remains.
Why Is The Project Life Cycle Important?
While the project management cycle might not sound that interesting, it is important because it’s what we as project managers lead and facilitate.
The steps involved in any project are generally the same: define a project’s objectives, create a project plan to meet the objectives, and then make stuff happen to accomplish it.
Different project managers or agencies may use slightly different terms to describe the project life cycle phases, but fundamentally, they’re pretty much the same.
The project life cycle provides project managers with steps to follow throughout projects. It defines where to start, and where to go next at each stage in the project. No matter how crazy things get, you’ll have a reliable structure to go back to and regroup on.
When The Project Life Cycle Gets Complex
The project life cycle in project management is simple, right? No, of course not! Both simple and complex projects involve a lot of variables and plenty of grey area.
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