The life cycles of Projects

All organisms have a life cycle. They are born, grow, wane, and die. This is true for all living things, for stars and planets, for the products we buy and sell, for our organizations, and for our projects as well. A project’s life cycle measures project completion as a func­tion of either time (schedule) or resources (budget). The subject of project life cycles is discussed in PMBOK’s Chapter 2 on Organizational Influences and Project Life Cycle. This life cycle must be understood because the PM’s managerial focus subtly shifts at dif­ferent stages of the cycle (Adams and Barndt, 1983; Kloppenborg and Mantel, 1990). During the early stages, the PM must make sure that the project plan really reflects the wishes of the client as well as the abilities of the project team and is designed to be consistent with the goals and objectives of the parent organization.

As the project goes into the implementation stage of its life cycle, the PM’s atten­tion turns to the job of keeping the project on budget and schedule—or, when chance interferes with progress, to negotiating the appropriate trade-offs to correct or minimize the damage. At the end of the project, the PM turns into a “fuss-budget” to assure that the specifications of the project are truly met, handling all the details of closing out the books on the project, making sure there are no loose ends, and that every “i” is dotted and “t” crossed.

Many projects are like building a house. A house-building project starts slowly with a lot of discussion and planning. Then construction begins, and progress is rapid. When the house is built, but not finished inside, progress appears to slow down and it seemingly takes forever to paint everything, to finish all the trim, and to assemble and install the built-in appliances. Progress is slow-fast-slow, as shown in Figure 1-2.

It used to be thought that the S-shaped curve of Figure 1-2 represented the life cycle for all projects. While this is true of many projects, there are important exceptions. Anyone who has baked a cake has dealt with a project that approaches completion by a very different route than the traditional S-curve, as shown in Figure 1-3.

The process of baking a cake is straightforward. The ingredients are mixed while the oven is preheated, usually to 350°F. The mixture (technically called “goop”) is placed in a greased pan, inserted in the oven, and the baking process begins. Assume that the entire process from assembling the ingredients to finished cake requires about 45 minutes—15 minutes for assembling the materials and mixing, and 30 minutes for baking. At the end of 15 minutes we have goop. Even after 40 minutes, having baked for 25 minutes, it may look like cake but, as any baker knows, it is still partly goop inside. If a toothpick (our grand­mothers used a broom straw) is inserted into the middle of the “cake” and then removed, it does not come out clean. In the last few minutes of the process, the goop in the middle becomes cake. If left a few minutes too long in the oven, the cake will begin to burn on the bottom. Project Cake follows a J-shaped path to completion much like Figure 1-3.

There are many projects that are similar to cake—the development of computer software, and many chemical engineering projects, for instance. In these cases the PM’s job begins with great attention to having all the correct project resources at hand or guar­anteed to be available when needed. Once the “baking” process is underway—the inte­gration of various sets of code or chemicals—one can usually not add missing ingredients. As the process continues, the PM must concentrate on determining when the project is complete—“done” in the case of cake, or a fully debugged program in the case of software.

In later chapters, we will also see the importance of the shape of the project’s life cycle on how management allocates resources or reacts to potential delays in a project. Management does not need to know the precise shape of the life cycle, but merely whether its completion phase is concave (Figure 1-2) or convex (Figure 1-3) to the baseline.

There are two different paths (life cycles) along which projects progress from start to completion. One is S-shaped, and the other is J-shaped. It is an important distinction because identifying the different life cycles helps the PM to focus attention on appropriate matters to ensure successful project completion.

Source: Meredith Jack R., Mantel Jr. Samuel J., Shafer Scott M., Sutton Margaret M. (2017), Project Management in Practice, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 3th Edition.