In examining the need for a project lifecycle having to have an element of self-examination, borrowing heavily from the ideas of the evolutionary process and compounding it back on itself gets you into a rather recursive idea of the need to be a lifecycle of change to … well … the project lifecycle. If a project lifecycle is to maintain itself then what does it need … a system by which that change is carried out. This by definition can cause problems, both in sanity and practicality, but in looking deeper into it bring another opportunity in defining the concepts involved.
Simply put at the base level a project lifecycle exists to fulfil a purpose. This purpose can be anything and there can be any number of project lifecycles existing in … um … project lifecycle-space … (apologies for that definition). If you go through the loop of how any changes to any of these projects can come about and keep going you eventually hit the singularity, the defining project, in essence what I am trying (rather obscurely you might guess) to achieve here. A SuperProject (again apologies and disclaimers for any foggily thought out definitions that appear here – I mean no harm to definitions in general, it just happens) is the exact process by which any project must follow.
Actually this idea suits me fine because it really encompasses a goal of how to achieve anything of scale and I personally have one application for it later with an idea I keep going back to at ‘Beyond One World’. A SuperProject will be defined by what has to be done in any project, anytime, anywhere. In this sense is probably useless in itself because it exists only as a kind of generic template but one that contains them all. My attempt at applying it to the lowly but interesting area of Internet marketing I think has a few qualities that enable testing it all out. The area and environment is always undergoing change, quite often totally new paradigms appear, the area is global and the project is in competition with every other system that exists now and in the future, it encompasses people, the fuzzy world of marketing, technology, physical quantitative and subjective qualitative decisions and finally most importantly, its success will bring in resources to ensure its future and on-going development.
Strangely enough the SuperProject is the one project that has no physical purpose but for ensuring that any project that is structured within it fulfils its purpose. It may be thought of as the definition for the ideal system and so the questions begin. What are the features, characteristics and principles behind achieving an ideal system? These will all be contained in the SuperProject, along with all of the functions to create, maintain, destroy and run any of the projects based upon it.
So what are these factors? What makes an ideal system or ideal project lifecycle? Is it simply to fulfil its purpose using minimum resources and maximum gain?