[Music] Hi, I'm Devon Dean, content director here at projectmanager.com. Hi, thank you for joining us for today's whiteboard session. Today's topic is around typical project phases. Now, there are four basic phases in every project and every phase of every project. Those are initiation, planning, execution, and closing. I'd like to go over these in a little bit of detail, show you the relationship, and maybe give you a sense of the level of activity that we can expect in each of these phases of the project or the sub phases of each of the projects. So, first off is initiation. When you're starting a project off, even before you've assembled the team, you've got to get the business case together in the feasibility study. you're talking to the board or the stakeholders to try and convince them that this actual project is going to have sufficient return on investment to invest in the the dollars as well as the mind share and the human capital to execute that project. You're gathering the forces and getting the ideas together and basically starting at the very early days around a project budget, type of skills you need on the project, and once again that return on investment of what the project's going to do for the business. The next phase that we actually go into is the planning phases. Now, after the board or the stakeholders approve your business case and and award your level of funding, you then go into a little bit more detailed planning. In the planning phase, you're doing things like your typical schedule, your resource plan, a more firm budget, um, and a cash flow plan for that project, as well as looking at the type of skills that you're going to need on that project team and starting to go and interview the people on that team. Now once you've got your project schedule, once you've got your statement of work, your terms of reference, and you've got your project team assembled, then you're ready to start and you're ready to execute in that project. In the execution phase, you're doing a lot of the activities of the project. And as a project manager, you're actually um implementing quite a lot of the controlling processes. You're doing risk management, issues management, change control management, communications management, additional planning and integration management with all the different stakeholders and all the different systems of that project. This is really where the meat of the project is um and activities occur. After you finish your executing phase, you then go into the closing phase, your next phase. In the closing phase, you're then sort of packaging up those deliverables for that particular phase. you are um starting to cancel the sub your vendor subcontracts and you're also trying to get acceptance of the deliverables of that particular phase. Now I'd like to show a little bit more on the relationships that these phases have with one another. Here I've gone through and just sort of plotted a couple of different subfases on a project. So a design phase and an implementation phase. Now each of these phases you have these separate um project typical typical project phases within the subphase. So for the design phase you have also initiating phase. In the initiation of a design you might do things like um give a highle specification or high level design document. In the planning stages you might talk about your architecture and how you're going to get your systems together. In the execution of the design phase, you're actually putting all those ideas and and concepts together in a document, design document, perhaps a functional specification or detailed design spec. Um, whilst you're writing that documentation and getting the architects together, you'd be controlling the activities of that. So, making sure that you're delivering that documentation on time, monitoring the progress, and inspecting it as it's being developed so that you're ensuring to get a quality product. And lastly, at the end of that design phase, you're then going through the activities to close it off. So you're getting the acceptance of the design, acceptance of the functional spec and buyin of the technical people and the project team that they can actually execute on that on that design. The next phase then after you've agreed and signed off that design specification is then into the implementation phase. Once again in the implementation phase, you'll go through these subphases to complete the deliverables for that phase. So you'll go through the initiating activities. You might bring the project team together and have that kickoff meeting. Um in the planning phases after the kickoff, you're then going through the itemized task list and getting them to buy in on each of the tasks and starting to own up in the accountability of the effort and the deliverables to achieve that tasks. In the execution phase, the team is actually doing the work whilst you as a project manager controlling phase are monitoring their progress and adjusting accordingly. And lastly, once the deliverables are achieved, acceptance testing has occurred, you're packaging and handing over the project to the operations. You might have another phase after this called change management. For example, if you're delivering a ERP system, for example, um you might have a change management phase where you're going through the people and process change as well. What I'm trying to communicate is that in each of these phases of a project, you also have these subphases where you might go through a series of steps and processes to achieve that particular phase. um objective. Now, just to shed a little bit more light on the activity you can expect in each of these phases, I've got a little graph here plotted time against the level of activity. Phase start on the left, phase end on the right. When you're going through the initiating activities, you would typically expect to see a ramp up of your personal activity as well as perhaps one or two other members of the project team. It'll look something a little bit like this with a bit of a peak and then trail off over time during that initiation activities. That's when you're doing the feasibility study, putting the business case together, making the numbers um and the ROI speak for themselves and doing presentations on those um particular artifacts to get the project started shortly after initiation. Perhaps a little bit in parallel, you're also going through some planning activities. So you're perhaps getting the project scheduled together, getting your resources and um assigned and seeing how that looks over time. So there's a bit of activity in that phase as well and that sort of peters off similar to the way the initiation phase peters off. The next phase and probably the biggest phase where you've got the line share of the work is execution. And that might start once again slightly in parallel to planning initiation perhaps just before you close out those particular phases. you see a level of activity where you're ramping up your project team, you're doing all the tasks you're doing and and completing your deliverables. And finally, you're finishing off those tasks. And lastly, the last phase is in the closing. Well, before those deliverables are finally signed off, you've got to agree those acceptance criteria. You've got to get buyin from the users and what they expect to see. and you're showing them the artifacts all the way through the project and getting incremental sign off on each of the deliverables so that at the end of the project you're not left with a stack of deliverables of sign off which cause that closing phase actually push out and could potentially hurt your budget. So once again, that's the last phase, the closing phase. In today's whiteboard session, I went over the typical project phases. Each of these phases, once again, could be a a small component of individual phases of a larger project. For example, the design or implementation phase. I've also shown you the level activity to expect during these phases so that you can better prepare for your time and the time of your project teams. For other how-tos, tips, and techniques, and all your other project management needs, please come join us at projectmanager.com.