I work for a small software/web development company that is growing quite rapidly. We are trying to standardize our process & we are having serious debate internally on how it should flow.
I believe it should be requirements/project plan/system design/development/testing/rollout
The developers feel it should be requirements/system design/project plan/development/testing/rollout.
What are people's thoughts on WHEN in the project lifecyle a project plan should be created & communicated to the customer?
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John ZacharProduct Dev Manager| Association for Project Management (APM)Brackley,, Northamptonshire, United Kingdom
Being perfectly honest, I don't think either is the best way to do it. The assumption that you are making is that there is only one lifecycle involved; that is not true - there are two!
The first is the project lifecycle (PLC) - initiate, plan, build, close. The second is the product development lifecycle (PDLC) which is frequently abreviated to four stages, something like requirements, design, code, test (maybe followed by handover). The PDLC can, and perhaps should contain up to seven or even nine 'steps'. A detailed version might be something like requirements or need, design, detailed design, specification, detailed spec, initial code, full coding, unit testing, integration testing, implementation, acceptance.
Each situation will be different, so any 'model' should not really be cast in stone. If is important to remember that almost all of the PDLC is in the build phase of the PLC; only a small portion of the need / design 'leaks' into the planning part of the PLC - you do need to know a bit about what you are building in order to plan for it.
Finally, I've used the word 'product' in the PDLC - think about deliverable - there are a number of deliverables in any project, and a PDLC exists for each of the major products or deliverables of the project. Hope this helps - e-mail me if there are any further questions. Saving Changes...
As a starting point, I suggest the book "Web Project Management" by Ashley Friedman. read the book and adopt its methodology to suit your needs. The ISBN # is 1-55860-678-5 Saving Changes...
Michael WoodProject Manager / Business Analyst / Business Process Improvement Guru| Independent ContractorGig Harbor, Wa, United States
Personally I think you should spend some time defining what each of you means by the terms you are using. I suggest you do not confuse project management with product development. Project management is how you control the process. Project development is how you build. They are quite different. The project plan should reflect all the stages (life cycle) being followed. You might find that you have a sequence of events as follows: * Market Needs and Opportunity Assessment * Target Market Functional Requirements * Prototype Development * Prototype Market Test * Detailed Requirements (Screen and Report Layouts – Data Models) * Functional Design (logic, data dictionary, application flow) * Development (programming and internal testing – packaging and marketing plan) * Initial Rollout (Beta test release, recalibration and promotional advertising) * Deployment (full release and full marketing campaign) * Support and Future Release planning Once you have your lifecycle phases agreed upon, then you can develop project plans to manage each phase. Be aware that sometimes these phases overlap. As a good PM you would want to understand where phases can run in parallel and where they cannot. Saving Changes...
