A Project Life Cycle is a series of steps that you take to complete a project from start to finish. Of course, it implies that you can complete the same steps for every project - so should you?

In principle, yes. Every project will have an Initiation phase, a Planning phase, an Execution phase and a Closure phase. However within these phases, the steps you take may vary slightly between projects.

The trick is to create a Life Cycle that is generic enough to use for all of your projects, while still being specific enough to add value and save you time on delivery. Here's how to do it...

Map it out

Every project is delivered in some form of Life Cycle. You probably usually define your project upfront, then you'll hire your team, you'll plan and complete a set of tasks to create some deliverables and then get your customer to sign it off as complete. This sequence of steps are what is called a "Life Cycle" and chances are that you're using the same generic Life Cycle every time you deliver a project!

So start by mapping out your current project Life Cycle on a blank sheet of paper and identify the elements that you know work well, and those that don't.

And improve it

Then try and improve your Life Cycle by analyzing why certain steps don't work well currently. Analyze the root cause and identify which steps you could take instead, to improve your chance of success. For instance, maybe "scope creep" is an issue for you, so by putting in place better steps for managing changes to scope, it would help.

Once you have identified the sequence of steps that you know will deliver your projects successfully from start to finish, the next thing you need to do is to "get detailed".

Get detailed

With a clearly defined series of steps, you now need to define the tasks and activities that are needed to perform each step efficiently. For instance, if your first step was to get funding for your project, then do you need to create a Business Case or Financial Plan to do it? What type of person will authorize the funding and what information will they need to do it?

For every step, describe how you intend to do it, the tasks and activities to be taken and who is responsible for them.

Tool up

Great, so you have mapped out your life cycle for delivering projects. Now you need to use a tool that allows you to link all of the steps together into a methodology, so that you can follow it for every project you undertake.