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Project Life cycle

A rational order of actions to accomplish the project’s goal or objectives called Project Life Cycle. Every project goes through a series of stages. The project is broken into different phases, which assist us in managing it better.
Every project starts with Initiation or birth phase, in which the standard for project achievement (input and success factors for the project) is set, followed by the second but the crucial Planning Phase, under which complex task of the project are broken into smaller parts/tasks, an Execution phase, in which the project plan is executed, and lastly a Closure or Exit phase, that spot the finishing point for the project and the project manager with a lesson for the next one.

The division of project activities into phases facilitates the project manager and the central team to develop an efficient plan and use the best resources for each activity. And it also helps to measure the level of goal accomplishment for further decision such as to proceed or quit with regards to the project or a certain activity.

Organizing project phases in accordance with the relevant industry project cycles are of paramount importance. The requirements, tasks, and procedures differ from industry to industry. Following the correct pattern or methodology would make the task easier for the project manager. Doing thing just for the sake of completion is a bad management. Therefore, a project manager should be working for the customer satisfaction or as per the end user requirement.

Initiation

The project initiation is the first ladder towards the success of a project. The purpose of this is to identify that an assignment or a project should be done, determine what the project should attain, and formally commence the project with a Project Charter. It is during project initiation that the project manager is selected and given the authority to create the team that will work on the project based on the skills and experience required. This is the first stage of the project and is typically represented by the formulation of the project. The function of this phase is to specify what the project should achieve.

The processes involved under project initiation are:

1) Creation of project description document: – This is a familiar, advanced statement unfolding the characteristics of the project.

2) Feasibility study: – a feasibility study is defined as an evaluation of the potential impact of a proposed project. This categorizes project constraints, alternatives and related assumptions applied to the finished product. This comprises of description of a business problem, approach overview for development, potential solutions and recommendations.

3) Establishment of Project charter: – It consist of project scope, authorities involved in the project at different level, team or organizational structure, project description and critical success factors. Project charter gives the team a clear picture of their involvement and responsibility throughout the project.

Team activities under this phase:

1) Conducting interview sessions with the customer and stakeholders.
2) Formation of a dedicated team for the project which might have a few other involvements.
3) Preparation of project charter, project scope and feasibility documents.
4) Groundwork for other additional documents preparation as defined in the business standards.

Problem faced by team in this phase:
• Demotivation of Project Team due to late project start.
• Lack of dedication from the Management and Key Stakeholders.
• Customer unawareness about the end product.
• Right kind of involvement for the project Team.
• Lack of consensus on Project Objective can terminate the project before it starts.
• Fail to create healthier work environment due to organizational politics.

Planning

Project Planning is crucial for accomplishment of goal or attainment of the desired result. It attaches an employee to a team, and makes them understand their responsibilities as an individual or team member. This Phase identifies scope, tasks, schedules, risks, quality and staffing needs.
The Project Charter is the primary input to a project planning and provides all the essential information which is required to proceed. The entire project goal is divided into a list of convenient or manageable piece of work called WBS (work breakdown structure) and it further leads to creation of schedule by calculating duration for each task which further discloses the critical path. After the resource allotment to the task in the WBS, the project schedule is refined, analyzed for risk and prepared for approval. The principle of the Project Planning Phase is to establish business requirements, cost, schedule, list of deliverables, delivery dates, and resource plan and gets management approval in order to proceed further to the next stage or phase of project management.
The process involved under project planning is:
• Scope Planning. This denotes the in-scope necessities for the project.
• Preparing the Work Breakdown Structure. This specifies the breakdown of the complex or bigger project tasks into a manageable chunk.
• Organizational Breakdown Structure. This step specifies people involved and referred for Project Completion.
• Resource Planning. This step specifies which resource will be allocated to what task at different stage of the project.
• Project Schedule Development. This specifies the entire schedule of the activities detailing their sequence of execution.
• Budget Planning. This specifies the budgeted cost to be incurred in the accomplishment of the Project.
Team activities for the period of planning phase:
1) Project managers are liable for developing project plan and must ensure that all the project planning requirements are fulfilled.
2) Functional / Management personnel are responsible for resource availability for the project.
3) The key stakeholder must approve the project before proceeding to the next stage.

Execution

It includes the process used to complete the work defined in the project management plans to accomplish the project’s requirements. The execution phase comprises co-ordination between people and other resources to carry out the planned work.
Team members execute the tasks as planned by the Project Manager, who is responsible for performance measurement.
The performance measurement includes finding variances between planned and actual work, cost and schedule. The greater part of the budget is stretched in the execution phase, since this phase focuses on the scope defined in the project scope statement and implements approved changes.
The execution phase consists of the procedures used to complete the work defined in project management plan for the accomplishment of the project’s goal.
The project management team should determine which process is required for a specific project. This involves synchronizing people and resources in addition to integrating and performing the activities of the project based on the project management plan.
During this phase, a little variation can be observed like activity durations, resource productivity and availability and unanticipated risks which can further cause re-planning. Such variations might affect the project management plan, but can require an analysis. As a result of such analysis, a changed request can be made, and if approved, would modify the project management plan and probably require establishing a new benchmark.

Monitoring & controlling

Monitoring and controlling gives a clear understanding of the project progress to avoid deviation from the management plan or corrective actions can be taken if required. The monitoring and controlling process group also includes controlling changes and recommending preventive action in relevance with the possible problems. This phase involves continuous monitoring and measurement of performance to recognize variances from the project management plan. The continuous monitoring activity also helps in checking health of the project and gives an opportunity to judge the areas which require special concentration. Monitoring and control activity give chance to a project manager of replanning in order to cope with new challenges emerged while executing the previous plan, which requires a little more consideration.

Closure

This is the last stage of the project, at this stage a project manager ensures that the project is brought to its accurate end. The closure phase illustrates a written formal project review report containing client acceptance of the final product , comparison of the initial requirements specified by the client with the final delivered product, rewarding the team for the success achieved, lessons for future, releasing project resources, and a formal project closure notification to higher management.

Project Closure Phase is the last phase of the Project Life Cycle. The origination of the Project Closure Phase is determined by the completion of all Project Objectives and acceptance of the end product by the customer. The outputs from Project Closure Phase provide a stepping stone to execute the next projects with much more efficiency and control.

Project Closure includes the following tasks:

• The resources allocated to the project are released.
• This stage indicates the end of financial issues like labour, contract etc.
• Compilation of all project records.
• All Project Records, issue faced in the project and their resolutions are documented for further reference.
• Recording lesson learned for future and conducting a session with the project team on it.
• Celebration for the success achieved.

The basic process of the Project Closure Phase involves:

• Administrative Closure: – This is the process of preparation of closure documents and process deliverables. This includes the release and redistribution of the Project Resources.
• Development of Project Post Implementation Evaluation Report: – It includes
o Project Sign-Off
o Staffing and Skills
o Project Organizational Structure
o Schedule Management
o Cost Management
o Quality Management
o Configuration Management
o Customer Expectations Management
o Lesson learnt

曾经为pasdoc做过汉化文件，且和它的主要作者有过3次电邮交流

I have just passed my SCJP and am now working on getting the SCWCD. I would like to contribute to an open source project, but haven’t explored any possibilities up to now. In the meantime, I’ll keep learning…

A free source project in Spanish, it is a web application framework :)
check it out please www.zenphp.es :)

I just did a little hack to OSSEC HIDS to let me change the display name of the email it sends. I might formalize this with a diff, making it configurable in the conf, and send it to the development list for consideration.

First I’ll monitor the dev list for a bit to see what’s shaking.

The past couple days, I’ve looked into contributing to an open source project – any recognizable one – and it seems like there is a significant barrier to entry to do this.

I started by searching Amazon.com, and all the books out there cover open source from a bird’s eye view, which isn’t very helpful. I am looking for printed material on actually contributing, rather than some overview.

Just browsing around on Ohloh, there are so many different projects that I would love to be apart of. Firefox, Linux, Rails, Subversion… the list goes on and on. I’ve used all of these software projects extensively, and I know all the requisite programming languages they are written in. However, I browse around on their bug tracking databases, and all the issues seem esoteric; I definitely couldn’t fix them without deep underlying knowledge of the system.

It would be nice to be able to cut my teeth on something. I suppose I could start with a smaller project – one that is smaller/newer which would, by definition, have more work to be done.

The proportion of open source projects that succeed in delivering something worthwhile, expressed as a percentage, without too many decimal places is, well, nil. Maybe two in a thousand, possibly three, but certainly not a whole percent.

However, the experience is still worth the time and energy and you will definitely learn something and meet some interesting people. Do it as part of a team. But don’t expect to change the world.

cizra (no files yet) is a forum engine for Ruby on Rails that I have started. It’s going slowly, so I figure once it’s done this goal will be complete.

No major contributions yet, but I had to mark some goal as completed to free up a slot on 43things. Marked “I want to to this again”.