Project Life Cycles at patterns & practices

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Note: This article is updated at Project Life Cycle at patterns & practices.

Periodically I like to revisit our project life cycle in patterns & practices. I like to see how it's shape-shifted over the years.  (Note - our project life cycle wraps our product cycle)

patterns & practices Project Life Cycle Circa 2005
Here's a snapshot of our patterns & practices project life cycle circa 2005:

PAGProjectLifeCycle

I used this as a baseline to reflect against.  Here are the phases, stages, and milestones:

Phases
Projects cycled through the following phases:

  • Planning
  • Design
  • Implementation
  • Stabilization
  • Release

Stages
Stages included:

  • Requirements
  • Specifications
  • Iteration 1
  • Iteration N
  • Final Test and Edit Pass
  • Production

Milestones
The milestones included:

  • Proposal Approved
  • Vision Scope Approved
  • M0 (Milestone Zero) / Specifications Approved
  • Technical Review and Solution Approved
  • Test and Edit Complete
  • Go / No Go
  • Customer Availability

Three Things That Worked Well
Here's three things that worked well with the original project cycle:

  • There were clear phases, stages, milestones, and deliverables, along with criteria.
  • The project cycle was decoupled from the product cycle.  This gave management a simple frame for understanding projects.  This also gave each project flexibility to choose the most appropriate software development methodology depending on the product.
  • There was sufficient time between key milestones to provide a frame + air-cover.  This helped avoid randomizing engineering and being able to see the forest from the trees.

Additionally, the key milestones such as Vision Scope and MO were something of a ceremony and tended to include the right representation across the p&p team.

Three Things That Needed Improvement
Here's three things that needed improvement:

  • It was a lot of overhead for smaller projects.  It worked well for larger programs (collections of projects), but it was tougher for individual projects.
  • It was tough to bootstrap projects.  M0 and Vision/Scope could be especially tough.  In retrospect, there were two key issues: 1) asking the right questions at the wrong time (premature) 2) chickens with controlling votes over pigs. (See Turning Chickens Into Pigs.)
  • There was too much agreement up front, with not enough ability to coarse correct in the later stages/phases (needed more agility)