This delivery process is intended to:

• Promote collaboration (both internal and external to the team), to align interests and share understanding
• Help the team focus on the architecture early, to minimize risks and organize development
• Help the team balance competing priorities to maximize stakeholder value
• Help the team evolve the product to continuously obtain feedback and improve
• Allow project managers to track status based on goals
• Allow team members to understand how to perform their work to achieve project goals

OpenUP is an iterative process with iterations distributed throughout four phases: Inception, Elaboration, Construction, and Transition.

Each phase may have as many iterations as needed (depending on the degree of novelty of the business domain, the technology being used, architectural complexity, and project size, to name a few factors).

To offer a quick start for teams to plan their iterations, OpenUP provides work breakdown structure (WBS) templates for each iteration, and a WBS template for an end-to-end process.

Iterations may have variable lengths, depending on project characteristics. One-month iterations are typically recommended, because this timeframe provides:

• A reasonable amount of time for projects to deliver meaningful increments in functionality.
• Early and frequent customer feedback.
• Timely management of risks and issues during the course of the project.

OpenUP is intended to offer process guidance to small, co-located teams.