The girls in the office have an on going dialog where we apply the Software Development Life Cycle (yeah, um, we’re professional nerds) to other aspects of our lives.

Regardless of where you work, the simplified SDLC goes something like this: Discovery –> Envision –> Design –> Develop –> Deploy.

Each phase has milestones and budgets, just like any other project. Tracking against them is an important part of the process and defines your success or failure.

As an example, we’ll use relationships. The Discovery phase consists of the first date and the analysis of the information you’ve gathered which will, in the end, define whether or not you want to engage in this project. Too costly? Too time consuming? Does it require resources you don’t have (an endless tolerance for throat clearing)? Key deliverables includes the definition of scope, which will outline what’s going to be done and what’s not going to be done in the upcoming phases. Modifications can be made to the scope document at any time, using change control.

If you engage in the project, we move to Envision, which could run 6 dates/6 weeks and includes determining what’s in scope and out of scope for the life of the “project”. Milestones may include commitment to monogamy or Home Base or meeting the parents. Here you’ll also want to define if status reports be needed and if so, at what frequency? To whom are they distributed (is your candidate a loner or does he/she have a tight circle of friends?)

In the Design phase duration would be considerably longer and is the groundwork for the Development phase. Development is where you write the code or, in our case, build your future. Because Development is so heavily dependent on a good Design to succeed, it’s vital that a great deal of time and attention to detail is spent in Design. Activities in the Design phase may include vacations (how well does your partner travel?), talking about your individualized vision of “home” and “family”. Does “home” mean a craftsman style bungalow with earth toned decor or does it even matter? Is “family” the two of you, or are there children in the plan? Animals? Do you live close to one another’s families and if so, what is the planned level of interaction with them moving forward? What are the risks to the project success? What is the probability for each? Can they be mitigated? There is no hard and fast rule for the duration of this phase, but the final milestone (how you know this phase is complete) may include little things like sparkly jewelry that conforms to your requirements from the three C’s.

Development may overlap the end of Design by days, weeks or months. Development may be planning a wedding, planning co-habitation or even buying a vacation home together and agreeing without the benefit of the courts that happily ever after sounds just ducky to you two.

Deploy? Well, it could be the wedding, it could be the cabin in the mountains, or it could be the rest of our life.

Circling back around, we remember that it’s important during each phase of the project to check yourself against the budget (emotional or otherwise), to level constraints (is your SO working too much during Design? If so, why and what can be done?), to reassess risks to the project, to validate milestone completion, and to communicate actively about how the project is tracking against the triple restraints (time, money, quality).

Once the project launches, you roll into Support or Maintenance mode which reminds us that a relationship - er - project - is a marathon and not a sprint. Upgrades may be needed, patches may have to be developed and applied, key functionality may have been missed during Design that requires a new short term project to append the original or the project may run smoothly for the duration. There may be deliverables even within Support (dating each other doesn’t have to stop when rings are exchanged).

So yeah, we’ve talked about this. We’ve talked about the other practical applications for it in shorter durations (rapid builds) when considering a new laptop or car or washer/dryer or vacation or new pet. (*cough cough*)

In the end, I’m a huge dork and I’m a little ashamed that I just took the time to write this all out, but in the end I’m laughing at the office. Are you?