What is Project Lifecycle

A project lifecycle (PLC) guides the project team through the pre-defined phrases. It establishes the structure needed for effective project management. 

A basic project lifecycle has four stages: initiating, planning, execution, and closure.

• Initiating At this stage, project managers define the project scope and values, confirm stakeholders, and perform initial stakeholder engagement and analysis. PMO is engaged in helping choose the project execution methodology. 
• Planning includes arranging resources, time, and features. The detailed plan requires establishing a work breakdown structure (WBS), evaluating the competency of the resources, and scheduling the project timeline.
• Execution ensures all the commitments are delivered on tim e and of high quality. The project manager needs to actively mitigate risks, solve problems and conflicts. 
• Closure  During the project closure, PMO will review and evaluate the project. The project managers need to work with the team to celebrate the fulfillment, reflect on the lessons learned, and perform project transitions. 

In practice, the execution stage is also called the Development to Production (D2P) process in IT (information technology). Additional steps are defined within the D2P process, including design/dev/testing, go-live, and warranty, to regulate the execution further.

A more compressive project lifecycle would add concept inception to validate the proposals before the execution and monitor and control on top of planning and execution to ensure continuous improvements. Although agile has been widely adopted to facilitate flexible delivery, we still recommend all projects to overlay lifecycle on top of every project for structured management.

Editor's Notes: You may refer to Front-End Loading (FEL), which is a renowned approach to plan the concept inceptions.