This PLC is based on the idea that regardless of what design approach you take, every project has certain milestones which you must reach. While it was primarily designed to successfully deliver commercial software, the PLC was intended to be applicable to any design project: major products, components, task forces with internal deliverables.
You decide what is valuable for your project. Use what you think will help you; omit what you think won't. Some projects may not require some of the deliverables, or even some milestones. For example, if there's no marketing element in your project, the launch milestones don't make much sense. (Although you may wish to think about what it means to "market" your product anyway). You might leave out something this time, but keep it in a later project. But before you decide to leave something out, think about it; we already threw out everything we thought was unnecessary.
There are two levels of customization you will likely need to perform in using this PLC. First, there are some important assumptions about the structure of organizations which may not match your environment. For example, these tools assume the existence of both project and a product team (which is usually a subset of the project team, made up of managers, and whose purpose is to guide the project). Also, it's assumed that there are these groups: Development, Quality Assurance (including test), Publications, Marketing, Product Support, International, Sales, MIS, Finance, HR, and Legal. You may not have all these groups, or some may be encompassed in others. You may also have organizations not mentioned here. Finally, every culture has its own terminology. Many terms are the same across cultures, but may have subtle, but important differences in meaning. We've included a fairly extensive glossary; you may wish to change it match the words you use.
You should adapt the PLC to match your culture.
The second level of customization is by individual project. What tasks you need to do is highly dependent on the specific circumstances. We provide a minimum set of milestones and deliverables to ship a commercial software product, but you may find you don't need some things. You may also find you need to add others. Take a look at everything, then choose what fits.
Some cultures using this PLC have chosen to require project managers to justify the items they omit. The idea is:
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