Project Managers or Organizations can divide the project into phases to provide better management control with links to the ongoing operations of the performing organization. Collectively, these phases are known as the project lifecycle. Many organizations identify a specific set of lifecycle for use on all of their projects.

Successful Modern Projects – even successful projects developed under the conventional process – tends to have a very well defined project milestone where there is a noticeable transition from a research attitude to a production attitude. Earlier phase focus on achieving functionality. Later phases revolve around achieving a product that can be shipped to a costumer, wit explicit attention to robustness, performance, fit, and finish. This life-cycle balance, which is somewhat subtle and still too intangible, is one of the underpinning of successful software project management.

Project Lifecycle

The project lifecycle defines the phases that connects the beginning of the project to the end of the project. The transition of one phase to another within a project’s life cycle generally involves, and is usually defined by, some form of technical transfer of handoff. The phases could overlap if the risk of starting a phase prior the approval of the previous phase is acceptable.

Project lifecycle generally defines the followings:

- What technical work to do in each phase
- What the deliverables are to be generated in each phase and how each deliverable are reviewed, verified and validated
- Who is involved in each phase
- Who to control and approve each phase

The characteristics of the project lifecycles are:

- The phases are generally sequential and are usually defined by some form of technical information transfer or technical component handoff
- The cost and the staffing level is low at the start, peak during the intermediate phase, and drop rapidly as the project draws to a conclusion

The project phases can broadly divided into two stage of lifecycle:

- Engineering Stage: Driven by less predictable but smaller team doing the design and synthesis activities.
- Production Stage: Driven by more predictable and but larger team doing construction, test, and development activities.

The transition between engineering and production is a crucial event for various stakeholders. The engineering phase is decomposed into two distinct phases, Inception and Elaboration, and the Production stage into Construction and Transition.

In many conventional lifecycle, the phases are named after the primary activity within each phase: requirement analysis, design, coding, unit test, integration test, and system test.

INCEPTION PHASE

Objectives

- Establishing the project software scope and boundaries conditions, including an operational concept, acceptance criteria, and a clear understanding of what is and is not intended to be a product.
- Discriminating the critical use cases of the system and the primary scenario of operation that will drive the major design trade offs.
- Demonstrating at least one candidate architecture against some of the primary scenarios.
- Estimating the cost and schedule of the entire project.
- Estimating the potential risk.

Activities

- Formulating the scope of the project
- Synthesizing the architecture
- Planning and preparing the business cases.

Evaluation Criteria

- Do all stakeholders concur on the scope definition and cost and schedule estimates?
- Are the requirement understood, ad evidence of the fidelity of the critical use cases?
- Do the depth and breadth of an architecture prototype demonstrate the proceeding criteria?
- Are the actual resource expenditures versus planned expenditure acceptable?

ELABORATION PHASE

Objectives

- Baselining the architecture as rapidly as practical
- Baselining the vision
- Baselining the plan for the construction phase
- Demonstrating the baseline architecture will support the vision at a reasonable cost in a reasonable time

Activities

- Elaboration the vision
- Elaboration the process and infrastructure
- Elaborating the architecture and selecting the components

Evaluation Criteria

- Is the vision reasonably stable?
- Is the architecture stable?
- Does the executable demonstration shows that the major risk elements have been addressed and credibly resolved?
- Is the construction phase plan is practical? And is backed up with a credible basis of estimation?
- Do all stakeholders agree that the current vision can be met if the current plan is executed to develop the complete system in the context of the current architecture?
- Are the actual resource expenditure versus the planned expenditure acceptable?

CONSTRUCTION PHASE

Objectives

- Minimizing the development cost by optimizing the resource and avoiding unnecessary scrap and rework
- Achieving adequate quality as rapidly as practical
- Achieving useful version as rapidly as practical

Activities

- Resource management, control and process optimization
- Complete component development and testing against evaluation criteria
- Assessment of product releases against acceptance criteria of vision

Evaluation Criteria

- Is the project baseline mature enough to be deployed in the user community?
- Is the project baseline stable enough to be deployed in the user community?
- Are the stakeholders ready for transition to the user community?
- Are the actual resource expenditure versus the planned expenditure acceptable?

TRANSITION PHASE

Objective

- Achieving the users self-supportability
- Achieving the stakeholders concurrence that deployment baseline are complete and consistent with the evaluation criteria of the vision
- Achieving the final product baselines as rapidly and cost-effectively as practical.

Activities

- Synchronization and integration of concurrent construction increments into consistent deployment baselines
- Deployment-specific engineering
- Assessment of deployment baselines against the complete vision and acceptance criteria in the requirements set

Evaluation Criteria

- Is the user satisfied?
- Are actual resource expenditure versus planned expenditures acceptable?

Reference:
- PMI: www.pmi.org
- Software Project Management - A Unified Framework: Walker Royce