A Product Life Cycle (PLC) Model

Introduction

The term "PLC" has stood for both a Product life cycle and a Project life cycle. We believe that a project is many times a subset of a product. Thus, products consist of one or more projects.

Many projects fail because they do not consider the bigger product view; the smallest of projects may need to "sell" their results, announce their completion, and in general do many of the tasks required of larger products being delivered to customers. Therefore, we suggest you keep an open mind about your need to do the activities suggested by these checklists.

We are not blind to the fact that so many PLCs have been slayers of countless trees - behemoth tomes which end up gathering dust on engineers and managers bookshelves. We hope your effort is better received. Our approach was to follow a simple design objective:

It should be easier to complete my project using this PLC than without it!

With this idea in mind we constructed a set of tools we think is useful, but it's helpful to understand our philosophy when learning how to use them. There is a lot of material presented here. We do not believe every organization needs to implement this entire PLC. Think of this as a shopping list. Look at each item and ask "Is it right for us?" Pick and choose. Read the reasons. we've included these items. Remember you can always add or remove items later.

Views

There are many ways to build a PLC; here we present three approaches to the problem.

A Minimal set. This will get you started with checklists for a simple Alpha, Beta, First Customer Ship (FCS) system.
A Concise set. This is a complete Mini-PLC, with checklists for major and minor milestones.
The Smorgasbord (A work in progress). This is all the Milestones in a beginning to end structure. Included are checklists plus templates of various deliverables.

Getting Help

If you want to save yourself and your organization time and trouble, Coyote Valley Software can provide you with one- or two-day seminars on this PLC model. Please send mail for rates and availability.

Credits

What's presented here is based on the hard work by lots of people over several years at least four different companies, spanning continents, and uncounted bottles of fine wine.

About the Authors

Brian Lawrence
Bob Johnson and more Bob

Downloading

To download: Save the Checklists as /plc/chklist.doc (Not implemented yet)

Feedback

We are very interested in providing software teams with more and better information about producing and using Life Cycles. Let us know how we can improve this site and provide us with links we can include to other work in this area.

Thank you.

E-mail: Brian & Bob

Last updated: 28 Feb 1998