2. Understand project lifecycles

Question 1

Outline four ways in which outputs of knowledge management informs decision
making.

Answer 1

1. By consulting an organisational lessons learnt register, the project manager can use the experience from similar projects to avoid potential issues and mitigate risks.
2. Encouraging the project team to share experience and expertise ensures that decisions are made with all of the relevant information available.
3. Ensuring that there are clearly documented processes and procedures as part of the project can be used to decide what resources are required to deliver when transitioning to Business As Usual.
4. Utilising best practice resources, e.g. published standards, in order to make decisions based on the benefit of external expertise and experience.

Question 2

Explain how the following differ between a project life cycle and an extended life
cycle:
■ Scope planning
■ Benefits planning
■ Financial planning

Answer 2

Scope planning will look at the overall detail of the project. the extended lifecycle will include the operations phase, the benefits realisation and the termination of the project. When scoping out a project the timeline associated with each of these additional stages will need to be planned for. This could
include additional life cycle maintenance requirements throughout the operational phase. The scope of these works and the organisation required to carry them out will need to be included in the original scope document. The project life cycle scope planning would not include this additional detail, it would end once the handover process to operations has taken place and all documentation and lessons learned
have been extracted and documented.

Benefits planning for the extended life cycle will need to look at the benefits realisation of the project. This will include a benefits realisation review carried out once the project manager has finished, all documentation has been handed over, all training requirement for operations has been completed and all lessons learned has been extracted. This is the responsibility of the project sponsor and the results will be passed onto the project board and stakeholders. The benefits planning of the project life cycle would
end once the operations phase has commenced but for the extended life cycle the benefits model will continue to include the operational benefits.

Financial planning for the extended life cycle will also include the costs associated with the operational phase, this may include manpower, maintenance requirements, spare parts, tooling and the eventual
decommissioning and removal or destruction of the project. In the case of offshore wind this will also include the removal of all infrastructure and return of the land or seabed to the original condition. These
decommissioning costs can provide a large unforeseen cost to the financial planning should they not be foreseen at the scoping stage. The financial planning for the project life cycle will only include costs associated up until the handover of the project

Question 3

Learning Outcome Understand project life cycles.

Question part (a) Explain two reasons why projects are structured in phases in a linear project life cycle.

Marks 20 marks (10 marks each)

Question part (b) Explain three differences between linear and iterative life cycles.

Marks 30 marks (10 marks each)

Answer 3

Question part (a)

1) Improved planning of work – linear projects are structured in phases to enable improved planning of work due to the increased visibility of requirements and work elements. When planning is taking place, the structured phases allow for the near-term stages to be planned in much more detail than later stages which are outlined at this point. This is advantageous as later stages may be subject to change so having the structured stages enables maximisation of planning effort/resources/time.

2) Prioritisation – having structured phases enables clear and precise prioritisation of work packages, as focus can be shifted towards elements/characterisation of the project phase/stage which is currently occurring. For example, during the deployment stage, the team will be focusing on ‘design, building and testing’ work packages/elements for the products rather than the ‘creation of the project management plan’ which happens in the concept and definition phases or the adoption of the deliverables into the wider organisation as that happens after the transition stage. Having defined structured phases makes it very clear what the team need to prioritise and enables focus to be on important factors in each stage.

Question part (b)

Three differences between the traditional linear lifecycles and the iterative lifecycles are:

1) Linear lifecycles are comprised of sequential phases (concept – definition – deployment – transition) which is a more stable and low risk approach. Each phase is undertaken until the work is at a desired state (decided by the project sponsor) only then does the team move into the next phase. However, this is not the case with iterative lifecycles. The iterative lifecycle is designed so that the solution is developed iteratively and incrementally within sprints with continual feedback from the customer until the final deliverables are produced using repeated phases (deployment)

2) Linear lifecycles tend to realise the benefits of the project after the project has been closed down and the deliverables have been adopted into business-as-usual activities, which can be anywhere from 6-12 months after transition period. This is due to allowing time for the deliverables to be integrated into the organisation and for the organisation to realise the benefits from the outputs/outcomes. The difference with iterative lifecycles is that benefits are realised incrementally throughout the project lifecycle, due to short timeboxes/sprints. The customer provides continual feedback to the team in an iterative approach which means that the customer does not wait until the end of the project lifecycle to realise the benefits of the work being undertaken.

3) Iterative lifecycles allow the project team to only deliver what has been completed by the end of the sprint/timebox. For example, if the team was expected to produce item ‘A’ and ‘B’ from the sprint backlog at the end of sprint ‘1’ and they had completed item ‘A’ but were not able to start working on item ‘B’ then they would only deliver item ‘A’ at the end of sprint ‘1’ and then item ‘B’ would go back into the product backlog for re-prioritisation (by the product owner) for the next sprint. In contrast, this does not happen in linear lifecycles, in linear lifecycles the deliverables are only produced to the customer during the transition phase once all design, build and testing has been completed.