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2 - ORGANIZATIONAL INFLUENCES AND PROJECT LIFE CYCLE

Iterative and incremental life cycles are generally preferred when an organization needs to manage changing
objectives and scope, to reduce the complexity of a project, or when the partial delivery of a product is beneficial
and provides value for one or more stakeholder groups without impact to the final deliverable or set of deliverables.
Large and complex projects are frequently executed in an iterative fashion to reduce risk by allowing the team to
incorporate feedback and lessons learned between iterations.

2.4.2.4 Adaptive Life cycles

Adaptive life cycles (also known as change-driven or agile methods) are intended to respond to high levels
of change and ongoing stakeholder involvement. Adaptive methods are also iterative and incremental, but differ
in that iterations are very rapid (usually with a duration of 2 to 4 weeks) and are fixed in time and cost. Adaptive
projects generally perform several processes in each iteration, although early iterations may concentrate more on
planning activities.

The overall scope of the project will be decomposed into a set of requirements and work to be performed,
sometimes referred to as a product backlog. At the beginning of an iteration, the team will work to determine
how many of the highest priority items on the backlog list can be delivered within the next iteration. At the end of
each iteration, the product should be ready for review by the customer. This does not mean that the customer is
required to accept delivery, just that the product should not include unfinished, incomplete, or unusable features.
The sponsor and customer representatives should be continuously engaged with the project to provide feedback
on deliverables as they are created and to ensure that the product backlog reflects their current needs.
Adaptive methods are generally preferred when dealing with a rapidly changing environment, when requirements
and scope are difficult to define in advance, and when it is possible to define small incremental improvements that
will deliver value to stakeholders.

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