This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Friday, April 04, 2003
Project Lifecycles -- Johanna Rothman has a nice summary of "types of lifecycles" for projects...
* Linear: Waterfall and waterfall with feedback
* Iterative: Spiral, where the whole product is up for grabs each time
* Incremental: Where you add to the product in pieces
* Agile: cycles (iterations) of chunks (increments): Add to the product in pieces, where each iteration you can deal with the whole product.
* Random: code and fix
She continues with some suggestions for uses of each, which I still have to absorb a bit. But I'm sensing uncommon sense in her conclusion...
"Once you've got your head wrapped around lifecycles, remember that different parts of the entire project can have different lifecycles. If you're doing an iterative lifecycle for development, the testers can still use an incremental lifecycle. It's harder to plan, but if it works, that's all that matters, right?"
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