The Project Life Cycle

In this book, we make reference to various phases in the life of a project. These are the project phases and elements that are common to many, if not most, web development projects. The tips and techniques we offer are relevant to many phases in the project life cycle. For example, the section on how to run a meeting effectively will serve you well through your project, and perhaps even beyond your web project experience.

Following is a brief description of each phase, and where we discuss it in this book.

• Planning: This is typically the first phase of most projects, and involves outlining the full scope of the project. In some consulting organizations, this phase follows the approval of a proposal or scope of work. In many internal projects, the project begins with the planning phase. We define the conclusion of the planning phase with the client's approval of the wireframes, and requirements document. We discuss planning in Chapters 4 and 5.
• Visual design: This is often the most variable part of a project. In a web site development project, the design phase is often the area of the project where nontechnical team members have the most input, and where many smaller projects run over budget. Your best approach to keeping the visual design phase on track and on-budget is to produce an excellent requirements document and wireframes in phase 1. We discuss the design process in Chapters 5 and 6.
• Development: This is often the largest phase of the project, and where you have the greatest opportunity to be efficient, focused, and really allow your development team to stretch their wings. Conversely, this is also where you have the greatest opportunity to avoid the most dangerous mistakes from which most web projects suffer. Depending on the type and size of project, the development phase may start immediately after the planning phase, and conclude up to the testing phase. We offer lots of actionable tips and techniques on how to make this phase rewarding in Chapters 6, 7, and 8.
• Content: The content phase of the project often overlaps with development and testing. This is the phase where you engage your users or client to begin populating the system you're building with content or data. As part of this phase you also provide training to your client. Training is critical to the success of your project, but sadly is one of the most often overlooked areas of web projects. We discuss the content phase in Chapters 8, 9, and 10.
• Testing: When Chris first started running web projects, he felt guilty about having a section of the project and budget called “Testing” or “Quality Assurance.” After all, when delivering a quality service or product, should it not be perfect? It's taken him many years to recognize that any project that does not plan for testing and quality assurance will not only fail, but fail spectacularly. Depending on the size of the project, quality assurance and testing can represent 5%–20% of the project budget. Check out Chapter 9 for an easy-to-follow guide for testing.
• Launch: Simply completing development or testing of a project does not define completion. It's useful to identify explicitly the discrete steps needed to launch a project successfully. We cover launching a web site in Chapter 10.

  Additional project management responsibilities fall outside of the project process we outline here. In subsequent chapters, we also cover the following:

• Defining the project: Before a proposal is signed it must first be created. The task of turning initial, nebulous discussions with a client about a problem they face into a sensible (for both you and the client) proposal requires a thoughtful approach. We cover the process of defining a project in Chapter 2.
• Meetings, meetings, meetings: If there is one common theme that binds together the activities of a project manager, it is the meeting. Meetings can keep your project running smoothly as easily as they can devastate budgets and sap morale. We talk about how to run focused and efficient meetings that keep everyone happy in Chapter 3.
• Support and operations: Of course, launching the web site is only an intermediate step in the life cycle of your project. Now comes the really hard part: support and operations. Without a concrete plan for support and operations, even the most successful project can begin to degrade and cause pain. We cover how to make support and operations smooth in Chapter 11.