PHASE BREAKDOWN

If your projects are like most, they have five phases: feasibility, requirements, design, build, and implementation.

In the feasibility phase, you investigate whether your project is possible and acquire enough preliminary information on whether to continue the project. In the requirements phase, you acquire as much information as possible to complete your project and try to determine what you must fulfill before completing your project. In the design phase, you create a way to fulfill requirements and explore different approaches to meet those needs. In the build phase, you do something to meet the requirements and design, which involves constructing the output that you will deliver upon the project’s completion. In the implementation phase, you place the output into the real world. No doubt, you will find the need to revise the output to increase its usefulness.

These phases can occur in several sequences. For example, they can occur linearly, such as feasibility, then requirements, and so on. Or some phases can occur in parallel, such as requirements and design phases occurring at the same time.

Breaking projects into phases offers many benefits. It simplifies the management of a project, allows for better planning, and increases understanding. It also helps to identify the relationships among the tasks and the different outputs created throughout the life cycle of a project.

for Phase Breakdown

• Identify the product to build or the service to deliver.
• Identify the major blocks of activities or phases.
• Experiment with determining the sequence of those blocks.
• Select the sequence that best serves your needs.
• Identify the demand to produce, for each phase.