The envisioning phase addresses one of the most fundamental requirements for project success - unification of the project team behind a common vision. The project and engagement team must have a clear vision of what it wants to accomplish and be able to state it in terms that will motivate the entire team and the customer.

Envisioning, by creating a high-level view of the project’s goals and constraints, can serve as an early form of planning; it sets the stage for the more formal planning process that will take place during the project’s planning phase.

The primary activities accomplished during envisioning are the formation of the core team and the preparation and delivery of a vision/scope document.

The delineation of the project vision and the identification of the project scope are distinct activities; both are required for a successful project.

Vision is an unbounded view of what a solution may be. Scope identifies the part(s) of the vision can be accomplished within the project constraints.

The planning phase is when the bulk of the planning for the project is completed.

During this phase the project team gather requirements, prepares the functional specification, work through the design process.

After these, the team prepares or refines from the statement of work, work plans, cost estimates, and schedules for the various deliverables.

The results of the design process are documented in the functional specifications.

The functional specification describes in detail how each feature is to look and behave. It also describes the architecture and the design for all the features.

The functional specification serves multiple purposes, such as instructions to developers on what to build, basis for estimating work, agreement with customer on exactly what will be built, and point of synchronization for the whole team.

During the developing phase the team completes all features of solution components (documentation as well as code).

However, some development work may continue into the stabilization phase in response to testing.

The developing phase involves more than code development and software developers.

The infrastructure is also developed during this phase and all roles are active in building and testing deliverables.

The stabilizing phase conducts testing on a solution whose features are complete. Testing during this phase emphasizes usage and operation under realistic environmental conditions. The team focuses on resolving and triaging (prioritizing) bugs and preparing the solution for release.

Early during this phase it is common for testing to report bugs at a rate faster than developers can fix them. There is no way to tell how many bugs there will be or how long it will take to fix them.

There are, however, a couple of statistical signposts known as bug convergence and zero-bug bounce that helps the team project when the solution will reach stability. Once a build has been deemed stable enough to be a release candidate, the solution is deployed to a pilot group.

The stabilizing phase culminates in the release readiness milestone. Once reviewed and approved, the solution is ready for full deployment to the live production environment.

The operations phase culminates the stabilizing phase.

By this time, the deployed solution should be providing the expected business value to the customer and the team should have effectively terminated the processes and activities it employed to reach this goal.

The customer must agree that the team has met its objectives before it can declare the solution to be in production and close out the project.

This requires a stable solution, as well as clearly stated success criteria. In order for the solution to be considered stable, appropriate operations and support systems must be in place.