Subtitles of the Movie

As you may know, all projects contain a project lifecycle which literally refers to the life of a project. The actual definition is that the project lifecycle defines the project from beginning to end, connected by various phases. You'll need to understand what the project lifecycle is to visualize all of the pieces together. This here is the overall foundation of a project and understanding project phases is important so let's review phases in more detail. Project phases are what projects are divided into in order to manage them more effectively. Usually phases define technical work, deliverables, who's involved and monitoring and approval. A project may contain various numbers of phases. It can vary by company, project size and complexity and even by industry so there is no set number of phases that a project may contain, although it's common to see standardization of phases. For example, a software development project commonly has a requirements phase, design, development, testing and also an implementation phase. Another common, more generic group of phases includes initiation, planning, executing and closing phase. All the phases that you see on the screen together encompass the project lifecycle. You'll often hear project management lifecycle as well, which is the management of the actual project phases within a project. Let's look inside of a phase. The PMBOK Guide describes a project phase as a collection of logically related project activities, usually culminating in the completion of a major deliverable. Within a phase, the project team makes use of the five process groups within project management: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling and closing. Whether all of these process groups or processes within them are utilized simply depends on whether they're needed for that phase. The processes within the PMBOK Guide are meant to be used within project phases and within a project overall. So what you see on the screen can also represent the entire project. Here are a few more notes on project phases. There is a beginning, middle and ending phase. They occur sequentially. There is no set number of phases that must occur within a project since it varies by project complexity, industry and sometimes by company. A project may be divided into various types of phases, depending on several factors, such as the project itself and industry. I pointed out an example of grouping of project phases a moment ago, which is what you see on your screen. And an important note often missed is that moving from one phase to the next is a formal process, just as the beginning of phase and closing it out. They are not occurrences that take place without acknowledgement or first obtaining approval. This was just a snapshot of the project lifecycle. Before moving further you'll need to know more about each process group; initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling and closing, which I didn't mention too much about in this movie. We'll cover these in more detail over the next few movies within this section. And that brings this movie to a close.