Project Managing E-Learning

The “Waterfall Project” Philosophy

Traditionally, project management has followed a “waterfall” approach. This approach uses a sequence of phases:

• definition and approval of a set of requirements

• creation of a timeline and budget to produce the deliverables defined in the requirements phase

• a design and implementation phase to produce the deliverables

• a postmortem to evaluate success and failure in producing the deliverables on time and within budget.

Because no phase is revisited once completed (hence the term waterfall), the most critical phase is often the requirements phase. Once the requirements are defined, any change to them is often treated as a “problem,” and the success of the project is often measured by how well the team produced the ...