❤️ 15/15
A road vs a set of moves: the project life cycle and the five process groups
Two concepts that are constantly confused — let's pull them apart first.
Project life cycle = the series of phases a project passes through from start to finish: each phase produces a set of deliverables, and at the end of a phase there is often a 'phase gate' — a go/no-go decision on whether to keep investing or stop here.
The five process groups = Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring & Controlling, and Closing — IPECC for short. They are not the five phases of a project, and not five sequential steps; they are groups of management activities that recur within every phase — each phase gets its own mini-initiating, mini-planning, mini-executing, mini-monitoring, and mini-closing.
⚠️One line to remember: the life cycle is 'the road the project travels'; the process groups are 'the set of moves you make on every stretch of that road.' Treating IPECC as 'the five phases of a project' is the most common confusion — wrong on the exam, and worse in practice: if you really treat monitoring as a 'phase' that comes later, you won't look at variances until the project is about to collapse.
