From the course: Project Management Foundations

The waterfall project management lifecycle

From the course: Project Management Foundations

The waterfall project management lifecycle

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- [Instructor] The traditional, also called Waterfall project management life cycle, can be broken into five stages or phases that help guide a project successfully from beginning to end. Initiating is all about getting the commitment to start a project. You start by defining the project. What's the project supposed to accomplish? What's the scope? What's a rough estimate of the resources needed and the cost? You also identify the project stakeholders, and make sure they agree on what the project is. From there, you ask for approval to proceed. Planning is where you work with a small team of expert team members to figure out how you're going to perform the project. In essence, planning answers the questions, What are we going to do? How are we going to do it? And how will we know when we're done? When the plan is complete, it's time to get approval to launch the project. The next two areas involve putting your plan into action. Executing starts with launching a project. You bring your full team of resources on board, get them settled in and explain the rules you're using to run the project. After that, everyone jumps in to put the plan into action. Monitoring and controlling a project means checking what's going on in the project and how that compares to what you planned. If the project is sliding off track, you take action to get it back on track. Managing and controlling occurs throughout most of the project life cycle, starting during initiation, and wrapping up when you close the project. Which brings us to closing the project, this part is short but important. You get the client to approve the project, that is, officially accept that the project is complete. You document the project performance, gather lessons learned, close contracts, and help resources move on to their next assignments. Waterfall project management works well when the project goal and solution are clearly defined, and the scope and deliverables are clear cut, such as in building construction. Because you understand what needs to be done, you step through each stage once from start to finish. The more you know about the project, the better the Waterfall approach works. Straightforward projects with very little uncertainty are great candidates, because you know what needs to be done and how to handle issues that arise. If teams have worked on similar projects in the past, they can be more productive because they understand the work and know how to prevent or resolve common problems. That's a quick overview of the Traditional or Waterfall approach and when you might choose it to manage a project.

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