To help us understand how the project life cycle helps us understand projects and project management's role in work success, let me just share that I've drawn about twenty-six lemons in the last week.
Not a metaphor; let me back up.
I enrolled in a graphic design certificate a few weeks back. One of our first big projects focusing on image-making: what is the shape of a given object in its simplest form? The prompt asks us to choose a household object, distill it down to the components that are essential to recognizing it, and then use that understanding to draw this single object in as many different ways in as many different mediums as possible.
In my case, I've chosen a lemon, which means I just keep drawing them and drawing them. I've learned that the more you do this with a given object, the more you understand what they actually look like.
For example, you might think at first that a lemon is round -- and it would probably only take you a few minutes to remember that no they're not, they're football-shaped. But even that isn't quite right: once you study a couple hundred lemons, you start to understand that they're kind of asymmetrical, with a more rounded end and an end that's usually a bit pointier. And once you've studied enough pictures of them in enough contexts, you start to understand that they're shaped that way because of how they grow.
And now we're getting somewhere. Once you look at a lemon and see the story of how it grew, it becomes a hundred times easier to instinctively remember its shape.
It's the same thing with projects.
The project life cycle is one of the best tools we have for understanding how projects are "shaped". If you're new to the project life cycle, let me recommend up-front that you spend some time studying it; the good news, though, is that it's pretty intuitive. We can look at five stages:
And that's really it -- at a 10,000 yard view, that's the entirety of how any project happens, even a billion-dollar, decade-long project. Of course, there are endless ways to learn beyond that (anything from self-studying through reading to structured boot camps)... but honestly, don't start on any of that until you can read over those five stages and make sense of them. Everything else (literally, everything else) follows from there.
A good project manager understands the general shape of a project. A great project manager understands that the project is shaped that way because of how it grew.
Sometimes when you start a graphic design certificate you are not really able to predict where it will take you.
A project representing a brand new strategic initiative, for example, is likely to have a long and potentially laborious, or even contentious, initiation phase. In the initiation phase, the project's leadership team (sponsor, manager, relevant executives, etc) are landing on the strategic importance of the project and the value we expect it to deliver: questions that you can imagine might not be completely buttoned up when a brand new project is on the table.
On the other hand, a project that represents a new iteration of an existing program might sail right through initiation but wind up in some tough conversations in the planning phase ("do you really need all that budget for a project just like the one we did last spring?").