Project Initiation

Main components of project life cycle and their description

There are five components of project life that are listed below:

Initiation

In the first phase, the objectives or the need to develop the project is recognized. The need can be seen as business problem or an opportunity to develop new one. The accurate response to the need is written as per the business case along with the recommanded solutions . In order to complete this, a feasible study should be conducted so that the investigation of each solution options of the objective of project is addressed and the last solution is identified. Additionally, the different problems of this feasibility study and justification are also addressed.

Planning

Planning is the next phase where the strategies are developed in order to achieve the solutions of projects so that best profit can be gained. This is also called scope management. The creation of project plan is performed to outline the several tasks , activities, their dependencies and time management (Burke, 2013.). The manager invest and make the budget of project involving the cost estimates of labour, raw materials, and equipments. This budget is developed by taking care of cost expenditures during the implementation of project. The three basic components of planning process are completed when the identification of the work, preparation of schedule and estimation of cost is done by project team. This is the correct timing when threats related to the completion of project is identified and dealing with that is performed by using some methodologies. This process is known as risk management.

Execution and control

In this phase, the various plans related to the project is put into movement and by this working of project is performed. The maintenance that is control and communication is implemented as per their need. The monitoring of development is done on regular basis and accurate adjustments are done as well as stored as variances from the original one. In all projects, the timing of manger is consumed in different steps (Blengini and et. al., 2012). During the execution of projects, the tasks are carried out by the employees and information regarding the progress is reported by team meetings regularly. The manager of project uses such information in maintaining the control over direction of project by examining the comparison of progress report in order to measure activities of project and taking of correct action as per need.

Closure

During this final phase or the ending phase, mangers concentrates on delivering the final products to their clients, the project documentation is handled to the business, termination of supplier contracts, release of project resources, and communication is done with their stakeholders in order to close the project (Adams and Barnd, 2008). The last step is nothing but conducting lessons and studies that are learned in order to examine the conclusions like what went good or what are bad consequences. The knowledge of experiences is transferred again back to the project of organisation that will be proved aidful in future teams of projects.

The importance of defining the scope of a project

The project scope management can be defined as the collection of processes that assure scope of project has been defined and its mapping is done accurately. This techniques allowed the project mangers and supervisor to allot the right amount of work that is necessary for completion of project successfully. It is the primary aim to concern with what should be the part and what should not be the part of scope of project. The scope is nothing but the information regarding what the projects delivers or contains. The importance of defining the scope of project are discussed below:

• Scope of the project is sum or total of all products of projects as well as their requirements.
• In some cases, the term scope used to understand the meaning of totality of work that is needed in order to complete a project.
• The tools that are used to explain the scope of a project is product break down structure and description of product. The primary tool is Work break down structure (WBS)
• that is described and implemented.
• Extreme management of project advocating the use of customer's stories, features lists and feature cards are used to explain the product-deliverable.
• If the need or requirements are not fully defined and explained then it become a rigid task to understand the goal of project.

Project documentation and its importance

Project documentation can be simply defined as an agreement, trailing and connection tool that is used by business owner, project advocator, the team members, different stakeholders, and the mangers of project. This is done in the initial phase of project development.The importance of project documentation is described below:

• It is one of the important part of project management. It is corroborated by two essentials functioning of documentation that is : making sure that all the requirements of projects are fulfilled and establishment of traceability with respect to what is done , from whom it is done, and the timing of this.
• Hence, the documentation laid the foundation for attribute or quality , traceability and past experiences for both the specific document and for complete project documentation.
• So, it is very necessary to arrange, improve the readability, and adequate of the documentation.
• The documentation of project is very necessary so that all the plans that are made should be permanently kept so that if they can be used when needed by the employees of managers.

The different forms of project documentation are following:

Business case

This documents kicks off the complete project. In this documentation, it is written that what are the reasons to develop the project and also it sums up or provide conclusion of the issues that the project is going to deal. It must be comprehensive and coaxing in nature that has as much details that justify the investments needed by the project.

The statement of work

If the corporation is working with a third party, then they will produce this for the company. If they are not present then this work is done by the enterprise itself (Greer and Conradi, 2009). It is nothing but the narrative description that what project is defining or delivering.

The project charter

It gives the employees of corporation, an authority to act as an project manager for the desired project. It is now him or her authorization to complete the project and this document interchange the idea into an actual program. Without this document the project does not formally existed.

Project management plan:

This is a vast document but the combination of different documents that make the plan for a project. It includes all the things that is needed by an employee. The management of the project involves different things like management of tolerances of project, various variations, the approaches related to change control, asses-ability of quality, etc.

Activity log

The activity log keep tracks of all the actions performed by the team. If something extra is done by any employee then it also adds up in this document of activity log.

Risk Register

This is same as activity log except it keep tracks of all the risks in the register and contains everything.

Status report

This also a collection of documents instead of a single document. This is very important because it provides the mechanism that is used by corporation to get information of stakeholders regularly. They are nothing but formal written record of process (Wiegers, 2007).

Budget

It is a document that consists of all the costing that are needed in development of project. The calculations are mentioned here and managers can easily examine these if any confusion is created regarding costs of raw materials or anything.

Identify the structures that should be in place within a project

This project can keep the structure of project management plan and budgets because these two structure are very important. The former one keep tracks of all the schemes that are used while developing the project. The several issues, their remedies and quality of the project is mentioned here. The project management plan is implemented in order to complete the requirements of clients and develop the project. The budget notify all the costing that are needed by several commodities like purchasing raw materials, revenues spend in manufacturing process, the transportation charges, costs of packaging, etc. The mangers of project can gather any costing related information from the documentation of budgets.

Planning issues

As the project is started immediately, there are certain issues are occurred that are listed below:

• Poor Outcomes: The result or the poor product is developed as the planning is not done properly (Stark, 2015).
• Lack of business support: The project may suffers the lack of business support. If it is not supported by the business then development of product will become impossible.
• Inadequate problem definition and planning: The problems of project are not discussed properly as the project is started immediately, due to the lack of planning the strategies are not developed and it is used randomly. This creates a bad result that will reflected on the project itself.
• poor front end description: The font end or the introduction of the project is poorly described because of this it is difficult to understand the aims of project (Wiegers, 2007).

Conclusion

From the above based report it has been concluded that the project initiation consists of several phases like initiation, Planning, execution and control and closure. The project documentation is also discussed where all the relevant information regarding the project is written so that if needed they can be used by the business or project managers. There are different forms of documents like business case, statement of work, status report, budgets, risk register, activity log, etc. that consists of several relevant informations regarding the project development.

References

• Stark, J., 2015. Product lifecycle management. In Product Lifecycle Management (pp. 1-29). Springer International Publishing.
• Wiegers, K., 2007. Practical project initiation: a handbook with tools. Microsoft Press.
• Greer, D. and Conradi, R., 2009. Software project initiation and planning-an empirical study. IET software.3(5). pp.356-368.
• Bribián, I.Z. and et. al., 2011. Life cycle assessment of building materials: Comparative analysis of energy and environmental impacts and evaluation of the eco-efficiency improvement potential. Building and Environment, 46(5), pp.1133-1140.
• Yang, J. and et. al, 2011. Life-cycle analysis on biodiesel production from microalgae: water footprint and nutrients balance. Bioresource technology, 102(1), pp.159-165.
• Blengini, G.A. and et. al., 2012. Life Cycle Assessment guidelines for the sustainable production and recycling of aggregates: the Sustainable Aggregates Resource Management project (SARMa). Journal of Cleaner Production, 27, pp.177-181.
• Burke, R., 2013. Project management: planning and control techniques. New Jersey, USA.
• Adams, J.R. and Barnd, S.E., 2008. Behavioral implications of the project life cycle. Project Management Handbook, Second Edition.pp.206-230.

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