Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A five-year NIH R01 moves through idea, proposal, pre-award, a multi-year post-award period with several no-cost extensions, closeout, and archive, in that order.
- Is an instance
A Horizon Europe consortium plans its data management plan during the proposal phase specifically because lifecycle thinking flags that archival retention requirements need addressing before the project starts, not after it ends.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A single grant report submission is not the project lifecycle -- it is one recurring activity inside the post-award phase of that lifecycle.
Editorial commentary
The research project lifecycle is the full sequence a project moves through from initial concept to final archival, and the organising framework research administrators, PIs, and institutions use to know what governance step is due when. Every dedicated CASRAI phase page below sits inside this sequence; this entry is the map of how they connect, not a replacement for any of them.
The six-stage sequence
Research projects generally move through: idea (informal, pre-funding exploration), proposal (drafting and submitting a specific application), pre-award (submission through award negotiation and acceptance), post-award (the period of performance itself — what PMBOK-style frameworks generally call the execution phase), closeout (the time-bound, sponsor-facing wind-down after performance ends), and archive (long-term stewardship of outputs after closeout reporting is complete). Reporting is not a separate stage in this sequence — it recurs inside post-award every time a reporting period closes.
What lifecycle thinking adds
Treating these stages as one connected sequence, rather than isolated events, is what lets an institution anticipate governance steps at the right time instead of reacting to them late — ethics approval before data collection starts in post-award, a data management plan drafted during proposal rather than retrofitted at closeout, archival retention periods planned for at proposal stage rather than discovered at the end. Hand-offs at each phase boundary are where institutional memory is most often lost if the lifecycle is not managed as a whole.
A note on "project phase" as a separate term
The dictionary also carries a "project phase" entry. The two terms describe the same underlying framework — "phase" names one stage, "lifecycle" names the connected sequence of all of them — and the site's own cross-links used them interchangeably. This entry is the canonical, fully developed reference for the whole sequence; project phase has been reduced to a pointer here rather than maintained as a second parallel definition.
References
- PMBOK Guide (Project Management Institute) initiation-planning-execution-closing model; Horizon Europe project management guidance; NIH Grants Process Overview.
Also known as
Research project lifecycle · Grant lifecycle
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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