Life cycle of a project or phase

All projects are temporary and therefore have a life cycle with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Because you are working on projects, or will be very soon, you know that nothing about project management is very linear. Even though we are looking at a waterfall-type predictive project, meaning we can predict the result, that doesn't mean that it is a true step-by-step process from beginning to end. Project management is, for lack of a better word, messy. There are all sorts of things going on at once. Hence, a life cycle.

In a guide such as this, it would be difficult for myself or anyone else to say, This is exactly how you run a project, and in this order. You might be thinking, Wait… what? I thought that is exactly what you were going to do. In this case, you would be overestimating my project-management powers because all projects are unique, and not every single best practice, document, tool, and technique will be used every single time, the perfect world versus the real world. In the real world, my projects consist of some set best practices and documentation but not always and not necessarily in this order. I also have numerous templates I use to make this process a bit easier, for example:

• Project charter or a statement of work (SOW)
• Project schedule and budgetary baseline
• Risk-management plan and risk register
• Issue log
• Stakeholder matrix
• Glossary of uncommon terms

A glossary of uncommon terms is an important part of effective communication. If I start babbling about empirical process-control and daily Scrums, as a customer, you might not know what those are and be afraid to ask about them. Therefore, having a glossary of three-letter acronyms (TLAs), and industry jargon definitions goes a long way toward effective communication and understanding. By the way, in case you didn't know those terms either, it's okay! It wouldn't be particularly good of me to give you a lecture on glossary of uncommon terms and not define the examples I used. The examples of empirical process control and daily Scrum are industry lingo found in the Scrum framework and is found in agile project management:

• Empirical process-control: Using expert judgment and experimentation to find the right answer or approach. It is the crux of the Scrum framework. 
• Daily Scrum: The daily stand-up meeting on a Scrum team where the team discusses what they worked on yesterday, what they will work on today, and what speed bumps are in their way.

Many times, the project life cycle is driven by a unique product that needs a specific phase-oriented way of meeting requirements, and another is being driven by organizational processes and the order designated by your PMO. All I can provide are categories of life cycles that are different phase-oriented configurations that are typical in project management and found on your CompTIA Project+ exam.

 In Figure 4.1, you can see that it is a cycle from project initiation all the way to the project or phase closure. There are multiple processes to plan, re-plan, execute and monitor, and control in project work before the project or phase is closed:

Because each process has its own role to play, we'll go through a high-level overview of each process group.