PMP Agile life cycles
Predictive life cycle

A more traditional approach, with the bulk of planning occurring upfront, then executing in a single pass; a sequential process.

Iterative life cycle

An approach that allows feedback for unfinished work to improve and modify that work. Incremental life cycle

An approach that provides finished deliverables that the customer may be able to use immediately.

Agile life cycle

An approach that is both iterative and incremental to refine work items and deliver frequently.

What do we call non-agile approaches?

There is no single term that is universally used to describe non-agile approaches. Initially, the practice guide used the term plan-driven to describe the emphasis on an upfront plan and then execution of that plan.

Some people prefer the terms waterfall or serial to describe this life cycle. In the end, we settled on the term predictive.

Many organizations do not experience either of these extremes and instead occupy some middle ground. That is natural, but we still need a way to talk about both ends of the spectrum. If agile is at one end, we call the other end predictive.

Characteristics of Project Life Cycles

The diagram below summarizes the characteristics of the four life cycle categories covered in this article:

It is important to note that all projects have these characteristics—no project is completely devoid of considerations around requirements, delivery, change, and goals. 

A project's inherent characteristics determine which life cycle is the best fit for that project.

Another way to understand how project life cycles vary is by using a continuum ranging from predictive cycles on one end, to agile cycles on the other end, with more iterative or incremental cycles in the middle. A  way to visualize the continuum is with a two-dimensional square, as shown below:

No life cycle can be perfect for all projects. Instead, each project finds a spot on the continuum that provides an optimum balance of characteristics for its context. 

Specifically, Predictive life cycles take advantage of things that are known and proven. This reduced uncertainty and complexity allows teams to segment work into a sequence of predictable groupings.

Iterative life cycles. These allow feedback on partially completed or unfinished work to improve and modify that work.

Incremental life cycles. These provide finished deliverables that the customer may be able to use immediately.

Agile life cycles. These leverage both the aspects of iterative and incremental characteristics. When teams use agile approaches, they iterate over the product to create finished deliverables.

The team gains early feedback and provides customer visibility, confidence, and control of the product. Because the team can release earlier, the project may provide an earlier return on investment because the team delivers the highest value work first.

Planning is always there

A key thing to remember about life cycles is that each of them share the element of planning. What differentiates a life cycle is not whether planning is done, but rather how much planning is done and when.

At the predictive end of the continuum, the plan drives the work. As much planning as is possible is performed upfront. Requirements are identified in as much detail as possible.

The team estimates when they can deliver which deliverables, and performs comprehensive procurement activities.

In iterative approaches, prototypes and proofs are also planned, but the outputs are intended to modify the plans created in the beginning. Earlier reviews of unfinished work help inform future project work.

Meanwhile, incremental initiatives plan to deliver successive subsets of the overall project.

Teams may plan several successive deliveries in advance or only one at a time. The deliveries inform the future project work.

Agile projects also plan.

The key difference is that the team plans and re-plans as more information becomes available from review of frequent deliveries. Regardless of the project life cycle, the project requires planning.

Characteristics of Predictive Life Cycles

Predictive life cycles expect to take advantage of high certainty around firm requirements, a stable team, and low risk. As a result, project activities often execute in a serial manner, as shown below

In order to achieve this approach, the team requires detailed plans to know what to deliver and how. These projects succeed when other potential changes are restricted (e.g., requirements changes; project team members change what the team delivers).

Team leaders aim to minimize change for the predictive project. When the team creates detailed requirements and plans at the beginning of the project, they can articulate the constraints.

The team can then use those constraints to manage risk and cost. As the team progresses through the detailed plan, they monitor and control changes that might affect the scope, schedule, or budget.

By emphasizing a departmentally efficient, serialized sequence of work, predictive projects do not typically deliver business value until the end of the project.

If the predictive project encounters changes or disagreements with the requirements, or if the technological solution is no longer straightforward, the predictive project will incur unanticipated costs.

Have you ever been involved on a project where the requirements seemed to change daily and thought, “We will know the requirements when we deliver a prototype that the business approves.” 

If so, this was a project where agile approaches could have helped. A prototype encourages feedback and a better understanding of the requirements that can be incorporated into each deliverable.

Characteristics of Incremental Life Cycles

Some projects optimize for speed of delivery. Many businesses and initiatives cannot afford to wait for everything to be completed; in these cases, customers are willing to receive a subset of the overall solution.

This frequent delivery of smaller deliverables is called an incremental life cycle (see below)

Are you unsure of how a new business service might work in practice? Create a proof of concept with evaluation criteria to explore desired outcomes. Use iterative approaches when you suspect the requirements will change based on customer feedback.

Incremental life cycles optimize work for delivering value to sponsors or customers more often than a single, final product.

Teams plan initial deliverables before beginning their work, and they begin working on that first delivery as soon as possible.

Some agile projects deliver value within days of project initiation. Others could take longer, ranging from 1 week to several weeks. As the project continues, the team may deviate from the original vision.

The team can manage the deviations, because the team delivers value sooner. The degree of change and variation is less important than ensuring customers get value sooner than at the end of the project.

Completeness and delivery are subjective.

The team may need feedback on a prototype and may then choose to deliver a minimum viable product (MVP) to a subset of customers. The customers’ feedback helps the team to learn what they need to provide for subsequent delivery of the final finished feature.

Agile teams, as a key differentiator, deliver business value often. As the product adds a broader set of features and a broader range of consumers, we say it is delivered incrementally.

Providing a customer a single feature or a finished piece of work is an example of the incremental approach. For example, builders may want to show a finished room or floor of a building before they continue with the remainder of the building.

In that case, they may complete a floor with fixtures, paint, and everything else intended for the finished floor before proceeding to the next floor.

The customer is able to see and approve of the style, color, and other details, allowing adjustments to be made before further investments of time and money are made. This reduces potential rework and/or customer dissatisfaction

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