Life Cycle the Author of This Report

¶ … Life Cycle

The author of this report has been asked to do an article review on a subject related to the business world and project management. To meet this requirement, the author of this report has chosen a journal article about the project life cycle. It was written in 2013 by an author by the name of Oellgaard. The article itself pertains to the performance of the overall project life cycle methodology in practice. The article appeared in Project Management Journal. The author of this report will summarize the article itself, will succinctly answer what the article is addressing, will identify who is potentially affected by the topic and will assert an opinion about how well the article is written. While the general idea of the project life cycle is widely accepted by many scholars and professionals, it is a wise idea to always keep track of the method's efficacy and performance over time so as to update and perfect the framework as needed.

Analysis

As partially noted by the thesis statement for this report, even commonly accepted and used project management and business protocols and standards are subject to review over time and new schools of thought tend to emerge as the years go on. An example of the latter is noted by Oellgaard when the author says that "a critical school seems to be emerging within the field of project management." The "old school" of project management asserts that projects are "real" in the sense that they have real characteristics that are common across many to most projects. The "new school" of project life cycle theorists assert that this is rubbish and that the precise characteristics of a project tend to differ greatly from project to project and that these characteristics are defined by the people and contexts involved. Oellgaard goes on to assert that everything in the project management realm should be treated based on the "social and natural world" in which they are located (Oellgaard, 2013).

Oellgaard did a data collection process and then processed the data based on the theory stated above. There were a total of eleven interviews and each of them was about one to two hours. The basic assertion of Oellgaard at the conclusion and results of his study basically asserts that "adopting a performative approach forces us to be sensitive toward the local and specific" and that this "simultaneously sidesteps critical presumptions." The author of the journal article is making a good overall point but is perhaps over-complicating the issue and is not really as "ahead of the curve" as he might think. Each project should absolutely should be specific to the people, locale and details surrounding it. However, the basic project life cycle steps are going to be basically the same regardless (Oellgaard, 2013; Brown & Hyer, 2010).

Conclusion