Project Life Cycles and Approaches

Every product you interact with—whether it is the smartphone in your pocket, a massive municipal bridge, or the software tracking a global supply chain—has a lifespan. A product life cycle represents the series of phases representing the evolution of a product from its initial concept through delivery, growth, maturity, and its eventual retirement. But the creation, subsequent updates, and final decommissioning of that product do not happen by spontaneous generation. They are engineered through targeted, temporary endeavors. Because a product can exist for decades, a single product life cycle can encompass multiple project life cycles. Understanding how we structure, govern, and execute these individual projects is the foundational vocabulary of project management.

As a project professional, your primary mechanism for organizing work is the project life cycle. A project life cycle is the series of phases that a project passes through from its start to its completion. How you structure these phases—and how you handle the unknowns within them—dictates whether your project succeeds or collapses under its own weight.