PMP Exam Tips: Understanding Product Life Cycle and Project Life Cycle

In one of my recent article I wrote about how project phases differs from project management process groups. One more important thing to cover  is how project life cycle differs from product life cycle.

It is not as confusing as thinking about project life cycle and project management process groups. The easiest way to think about it is thinking about a project of developing a new product. Each product has their own life cycle, called product life cycle. For example: researching, manufacturing, introduction to market, growth, maturity, declining and withdrawing. Withdrawing, or retiring, is often the last phase in a product life cycle.

So, product life cycle has the following characteristics

• Their phases are non-overlapping
• They may last for several years
• Each phase occurs only once.
• Phases are sequential.

With that said, let’s look at the project life cycle. According to the PMBOK Guide, 4th Edition, the general structure of the project life cycle consists of starting the project, organizing and preparing, carry out the project work, and closing the project.

So, developing a product may be considered as a project itself. In this case the objective of that project is developing a new product. However, project objective can be many more: market researching, establishing product team etc. As a result, there may be many projects within a product life cycle, each project has their own life cycle, which consists of many overlapping project phases. The distinctive characteristics of project life cycle are

• Phases within one project man be overlapping.
• Typically one project phase does not last more than 6 months.
• Project phases may be repeated during project
• Project phases may not be sequential.

Good luck on your exam,

See you next time,