Chapter 2
Project Management Life Cycle Models
The purpose of Chapter 1 was to define the project landscape. There you were introduced to the four types of projects that populate the project landscape. Every project that ever existed or will exist fits into one and only one of the four quadrants in that landscape at any one time. That landscape gives you a high-level understanding of the range of complexity and uncertainty associated with projects. Above all it is intuitive and gives you a framework within which to understand the various project management life cycle (PMLC) models and how the senior management team (SMT) interacts with them. Even though there are dozens of specific approaches you may have heard of (Waterfall, Rational Unified Process [RUP], Scrum, Dynamic Systems Development Model [DSDM], Spiral, Evolutionary Waterfall, Adaptive Software Development [ASD], Prince2, Microsoft Solution Framework, Feature Driven Development [FDD], Crystal, and Extreme Programming [xP] are but a few of the more popular ones) you don't need to burden yourself with knowing any of them. If you feel compelled to know about them, be my guest. I've included some appropriate references in the bibliography at the end of Part I. All of these models group into the five different types of PMLC models discussed in this chapter. These five types of models will not change and you need to have a conversational knowledge of them. Once you understand these five models, when to use them, and their ...
