Create your own Hybrid Project Life Cycle

There are various project life cycle approaches in use for projects. All of these have their own pros and cons. So process should be picked after analyzing these pros and cons from project perspective. But it might be possible that none of the existing approaches are actually catering to all of your project or Organization requirements. Hence, it is also very much possible to mix more than one approaches, may be in different phases of project or in different activities. Many of the projects are executed with hybrid approaches. To understand this, let us first understand about most popular approaches in brief.

Waterfall Approach
It is one of the most used approaches for projects till now. It is in use since long. The approach suggests to plan for the whole project requirements in one go i.e.

• Collect all requirements
• Analyze and freeze the requirements
• Do analysis and design for complete functions
• Plan and Schedule the tasks for whole project
• Complete the construction
• Execute the testing of all functions
• Fix the issues
• Make the project live
• Perform Maintenance activities

So you would see, it is a sequential approach to perform and complete all activities for a project going through conception, Initiation, Analysis, Design, Construction, Testing, Deployment to production and then Maintenance. Waterfall model comes from manufacturing and construction industries initially. Then it later adopted for software development also. And it actually worked well initially. It performs well for projects with comparatively stable requirements. 

Points in favor of this approach are that it give emphasis to complete the work for each phase with utmost perfection. It asks to design the system perfectly in design phase itself to avoid any restructuring later which can cost lot of money due to changes at large scale. It advocates to close the requirements in first phase itself, to avoid the changes later in project life. Due to these reasons, it results into a very stable project life cycle, easy to predict - plan - and budget. So it is good for budgeting also. It emphasize of documentation for each phase of project, and hence helps in creating the rich knowledge base. This remove the risk of loss of knowledge if any key member or members leave the project.