Lifecycle Management: When the Party's Over

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Lessons Learned   Risk Management  

As one of the core technical components of the PMI Talent Triangle®, lifecycle management walks us through various project phases before it finally culminates with the termination phase.

Highlighted in successful development efforts as the point of project closure, the use of the word “termination” is perhaps better regarded as a point when all parties can say that the work has been completed and successfully handed off to the customer and/or user group.

It can be a bittersweet moment as team members get broken up and reassigned to other projects, or put in the talent hopper for future opportunities—perhaps even taking some well-deserved rest and relaxation, or getting some training for new skill sets.

It also can mean taking technical—and potentially costly—resources that were needed for the project (like testing environments) and releasing them from their project commitments so they can be ready for other demands. And of course, the record keeping must be completed to help project beneficiaries understand what was produced and how to use it—some of which may be necessary in situations where product support and operations groups need to be pulled in.

This assumes that all necessary project criteria have been met and that the internal/external client has signed off on the finished work, but what of other situations? How …

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