The goal of the construction phase is on clarifying the remaining requirements and completing the development of the system based upon the baselined architecture. The construction phase is in some sense a manufacturing process, where emphasis is placed on managing resources and controlling operations to optimize costs, schedules, and quality. In this sense the management mindset undergoes a transition from the development of intellectual property during inception and elaboration, to the development of deployable products during construction and transition.

The primary objectives of the construction phase include:

• Minimizing development costs by optimizing resources and avoiding unnecessary scrap and rework.

• Achieving adequate quality as rapidly as practical

• Achieving useful versions (alpha, beta, and other test releases) as rapidly as practical

• Completing the analysis, design, development and testing of all required functionality.

• To iteratively and incrementally develop a complete product that is ready to transition to its user community. This implies describing the remaining Use Cases and other requirements, fleshing out the design, completing the implementation, and testing the software.

• To decide if the software, the sites, and the users are all ready for the application to be deployed.

• To achieve some degree of parallelism in the work of development teams. Even on smaller projects, there are typically components that can be developed independently of one another, allowing for natural parallelism between teams (resources permitting). This parallelism can accelerate the development activities significantly; but it also increases the complexity of resource management and workflow synchronization. A robust architecture is essential if any significant parallelism is to be achieved.

• Complete component development and testing against the defined evaluation criteria

• Assessment of product releases against acceptance criteria for the vision.

The Initial Operational Capability milestone determines whether the product is ready to be deployed into a beta-test environment.

At the Initial Operational Capability Milestone, the product is ready to be handed over to the Transition Team. All functionality has been developed and all alpha testing (if any) has been completed. In addition to the software, a user manual has been developed, and there is a description of the current release.

• Is this product release stable and mature enough to be deployed in the user community?

• Are all the stakeholders ready for the transition into the user community?

• Are actual resource expenditures versus planned still acceptable?

Transition may have to be postponed by one release if the project fails to reach this milestone.