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A full project life cycle is the project-specific sequence of phases used to organize work from its beginning through completion. Each phase groups related activities and culminates in one or more deliverables. There is no mandatory number or set of phases: a common sequence is feasibility, design, build, test, deploy, and close, tailored to the project’s needs.
What does “full project life cycle” mean?
The life cycle gives a team a framework for organizing a temporary project from its start to its completion. The Project Management Institute (PMI) describes a project as a temporary endeavor that creates a unique product, service, or result, and describes life-cycle phases as collections of logically related activities that culminate in deliverables. The phases help clarify what work happens and what outcome or decision marks progress.
“Full” means considering the project through completion, rather than describing only its planning or delivery work. The exact boundaries and names depend on the project and the organization’s control needs.
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PMI gives the following as common phase names, not as a required universal sequence. A project may rename, combine, expand, repeat, or otherwise tailor them.
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| Phase | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Feasibility | Assess whether the business case is valid and the organization can deliver the intended outcome. |
| Design | Use planning and analysis to design the project’s deliverables. |
| Build | Construct the deliverables, integrating quality assurance activities. |
| Test | Perform final quality review and inspection before transition, go-live, or customer acceptance. |
| Deploy | Put the deliverables into use and manage transition activities related to sustainment, benefits realization, and organizational change. |
| Close | Close the project, archive knowledge and artifacts, release team members, and close contracts. |
These phases describe the work and deliverables of a particular project. They are not a checklist that every project must follow unchanged. An organization can set phase boundaries and approvals to suit its work, and some projects revisit work as they learn or deliver in increments. PMI’s 2008 discussion of agile project management describes iterative work in which teams plan, review, and deliver increments within the project structure.
Are life-cycle phases the same as the five process groups?
No. PMI explicitly notes, “Project management process groups are not project phases.” The process groups are Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring and Controlling, and Closing. They describe categories of project-management processes, not a project’s particular start-to-finish phase sequence. PMI’s 2008 article explains that these processes can be integrated and applied iteratively throughout a project; they should not be substituted for the phases listed above.
Why do project life cycles vary?
The right structure depends on what the organization needs to control and what the project must deliver. A PMI-hosted article from the 2008 Global Congress Proceedings quotes the PMBOK Guide, Third Edition (2004), defining a life cycle as “a collection of generally sequential project phases whose name and number are determined by the control needs of the organization or organizations involved in the project.” The same article quotes that edition as saying “there is no single best way to define an ideal project life cycle.” These are historical quotations from the 2004 edition, reproduced in the 2008 article, rather than claims about the wording of a current PMBOK edition.
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- book
- A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) – Seventh Edition and The Standard for Project Management (ENGLISH)
- Which deliverables or decisions need formal review or approval?
- How often should the team review work and incorporate feedback?
- Is it more useful to organize work in larger phases, repeated iterations, or a combination?
- What transition, operational readiness, or closure work must be completed?
How can iterative or agile work fit a full life cycle?
An iterative approach changes how work is planned and delivered; it does not require the project to have no overall beginning or end. The 2008 PMI-hosted article gives an example in which iterations deliver increments of working code. It describes releases made up of iterations, with planning early on, increments delivered during intermediate work, and production-readiness and retrospective work near the end.
This is a historical explanatory example, not a universal prescription for agile teams. The practical point is that a project can have an overall life cycle while teams review and deliver work repeatedly within it. Phase structure and delivery cadence can be tailored to the project.
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- Harvard Business Review Project Management Handbook: How to Launch, Lead, and Sponsor Successful Projects
- Harvard Business Review Press
- BLANK BOOK
What standard covers the project-management life cycle for systems and software?
For systems and software projects, ISO/IEC/IEEE 16326:2019, Systems and software engineering — Life cycle processes — Project management, specifies required project-management-plan content and provides guidance for projects using the system and software life-cycle processes in ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288 and ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207. Its scope spans the whole system or software life cycle and applies across projects of different scope, products, methodologies, sizes, and complexity, while its stated focus is systems with significant software elements and software systems.
ISO identifies this as Edition 2, published in December 2019, and reports that it was reviewed and confirmed in 2026 and remains current. This standard is specifically relevant to systems and software work; it is not a mandatory phase list for every kind of project.
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