In this day and age, everything we do at work requires thorough planning.
As a project manager (or someone who’s found themselves in that position), you know it takes some amount of focused effort to reach the ultimate goal: project completion.
However, if you’ve never received project management education, you may find that there is needless friction in some parts of your work. It may be team members who don’t like cooperating, or just the fact that monitoring your performance seems hard.
Fortunately, project management can be a lot easier. The first thing you have to understand is the project life cycle.
Easily manage every phase of your project with Project Central for Microsoft 365.
Just like any other part of a project, you have to manage the life cycle, as well.
One of the most important metrics is actually life cycle length. Understanding how long it takes for your team to finish a project can help you estimate quotes and understand your strengths (as well as weaknesses).
It’s all about making sure you’re not among the 57% of projects that fail due to communication breakdown.
It’s impossible to optimize if you can’t measure so by understanding your project life cycle, you are actually gaining insight about:
When you view the project as a whole, it can seem overwhelming to monitor and analyze everything. This leads to a lot of data you could use to improve and yet, because it’s buried under the pile that is the project itself, you can’t.
It’s similar to how you break down projects into tasks to make them more achievable.
You’re making it more manageable and as such, it’s much easier to understand what you’re doing right and what you could be doing even better. For example, if you monitor different project life cycle phases, you can see if there’s a problem in a particular phase.
Maybe you haven’t received enough information in the initiation phase, which led to having to backtrack at a later date. Or maybe you’re just using the wrong tools that aren’t giving you enough information.
While project managers love talking about life cycle phases and definitions, the reason why you, as someone who’s managing projects on the daily, actually need project life cycle management is improvement.
It’s as simple as that.
