Project Management Essentials - Project Life Cycles & Development Approaches

Workshop 1 — Navigating project life cycles and development approaches Workshop 1 covers the material everything else in project management sits on top of. It starts with the vocabulary — project, programme, portfolio, stakeholder, constraint, governance — and the distinctions that only matter once you try to apply them. It then walks the project life cycle phase by phase, treating the boundaries between phases as decision points rather than administrative steps. The second half deals with development approaches. Predictive, adaptive and hybrid are each correct under specific conditions, and the skill is reading which conditions you are in. The workshop closes with a framework of four questions that decides most of it, applied to three realistic situations and one project worked through end to end. No prior project management experience is assumed. What you will be able to do Describe what a project life cycle is, and explain why phases exist at all Identify the purpose of each phase, and recognise what a well-run phase produces Distinguish predictive, adaptive and hybrid approaches, and state the conditions each suits Select an approach for a given project, and defend the choice Who it is for Anyone new to project management, and anyone working on projects without formal training in how they are structured. Foundational level. Workshops 2 and 3 build on it, but each stands alone.