The project life cycle is sometimes referred to as the performing organization’s or department’s methodology for projects. This is the logical breakdown of what needs to be accomplished in order to produce the deliverables of the project. There are many different types of project life cycles, depending of the product, industry or organization preferences. Plan-Driven and Change-Driven.
Microsoft in its Life cycle services proposes project life cycles for both approaches, including the most renamed methodology, Sure Step, that provides guidelines, field-tested best practices and user friendly tools that helps both customer and partner to conduct a successful Microsoft dynamics implementation.
The Life cycle services project workspace provides an outlined methodology showing each phase of your project and provides high-level milestones that are used to track deliverables and project goals.
The LCS project home page represents a single point of management for phases, steps, and environment for a project. The project management form shows the status of the project within the methodology, the project detail of the current phase as well, a description of the currently selected step within the project phase. Outstanding tasks that need attention are displayed on the left.
Let’s now take a high-level look at the project management features within LCS. As a customer, or partner, you must complete the steps that are outlined in the methodology box to gain access to the production environment. Before a phase can be marked as complete, you must complete the specified mandatory tasks. Locked tasks such as tasks 1.8 and 1.11 in this screen will be unlocked after you completed the required actions.
To learn about which actions must be completed before a specific task can be unlocked, you’ll click the lock icon for that task.
By clicking on the milestone diamond for the project phases, the detail about the project phase milestone will be displayed. In this case, the milestone shows what action can be performed once the milestone is reached.
The milestone will be unlocked when the prior phase is marked as complete. In this example, many steps have not been performed, meaning that this phase is not eligible for being flagged as complete. You can see here that the box has been grayed out.
In this way you can ensure every step required to achieve a successful implementation is completed and documented, keeping control of the project tasks, milestones, track its fulfillment and provide visibility to the entire project team at any time.