Understanding the project management phases
There’s more to it than “to-do” and “done”
The project life cycle is broken down into five project management phases: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, closure. These phases are your road map as you and your team conquer complicated projects.
Meet Sofia. She leads the HR team at her company, and they’re about to tackle the colossal project of overhauling their employee onboarding process.
Most of us (Sofia included) think of projects in two phases: you start them, and then you finish them.
There’s a lot more to it than that. Think of it like baking a cake. You can’t go straight from a pile of random ingredients to a delicious, frosted masterpiece. There’s a whole lot of shopping, preparing, mixing, and taste-testing that happens along the way.
Project management phases represent the different steps you take to go from beginning to completion. Understanding them will help you create more accurate project plans, estimate more realistic timelines, and conquer projects in a strategic and organized way.
Using Sofia and her team as our example, let’s take a look at the typical project life cycle and the phases that make it up.