What Is A Project?

As organizations have recognized the important of projects to their success, project management has become a focal point of improvement efforts. Project management applies principles, concepts, tools and techniques to improve project performance and organizational effectiveness. Project management adds value by improving the probability of consistently successful projects.

What is a project?

Encarta describes a project as a "task or planned program of work that requires a large amount of time, effort, and planning to complete". (Encarta, 2007) This meaning it sounds like it could be applied to everyday task. A project could be viewed as having designated steps needed to accomplish a goal. This is not necessarily correct for all projects. True projects have some characteristics they share. Projects have a clear and agreed upon objective, and have a defined life span. Where as everyday tasks can last a few minutes or longer and repeat again the next day. Projects generally are doing something new or a one time effort. Projects have three basic requirements that include time, cost and performance. Everyday tasks do not always fall into this category.

What are the basic phases of the project lifecycle and their purposes?

The Project Life Cycle refers to a logical order of activities to achieve the project's goals or objectives. It does not matter the size or difficulty, any project goes through a series of stages during its life.

Conceptual

This is the first phase in a project life cycle where a business problem, requirement or opportunity is identified. Most important in this phase is a first round analysis of risk and the resulting impact on the time, cost, and performance requirements, together with the potential impact on company resources.

Planning

This is the second phase in a project life cycle where the manager takes control of the project from creation of activities, assignment of tasks, timeline charts, deliverable checkpoints, allocation of resources. The success of the project depends on the success of the planning phase.

It is mainly a refinement of the elements in the conceptual phase and requires a firm identification of the resources required and the establishment of realistic time, cost, and performance parameters.

Testing

The third phase called testing is mainly a testing and final standardization effort so that operations can begin. Almost all documentation must be completed in this phase.

Implementation

The fourth phase is the implementation phase, which puts together the project's product or services into the existing organization. If the project was developed for establishment of a marketable product, then this phase could include the product life-cycle phases of market, introduction, growth, maturity, and a portion of deterioration.

The most important issue in this phase is to ensure project activities are properly executed and controlled. During the implementation phase, the planned solution is implemented to solve the problem specified in the project's requirements.

Closure

The final phase is closure and includes the reallocation of resources. The closure phase evaluates the efforts of the total system and serves as input to the conceptual phases for new projects and systems. This final phase also has an impact on other ongoing projects with regard to identifying priorities.

Proper closure is very important because it ensures