Why the Stage Gate Process will Make You a Better Project Manager

The Stage Gate Process gets too little love from Project Managers. Yet it has the potential to transform your project management, deliver more successful projects, and make you a better project manager.

A Stage Gate is also known by many other names:

• Phase Gate (PMBOK 6th Edition)
• Gateway (PRINCE2)
• Boundary Gate (most pleasing expression of the metaphor)
• Gate, or Toll-gate
• Go / No-go Review (literal name)
• Kill Point (severely deprecated by OnlinePMCourses)

In a Stage Gate process, you break your project into stages, or phases. Each stage ends with a gate. And the metaphor is simple: you don’t complete the stage and cross to the next one, until you pass through the gate. So, at each stage gate, the project’s decision-makers review your project against a set of criteria.

Using the information you make available, they decide whether to:

• Continue the project to its next stage
• Repeat work (stay in the stage), for resubmission for Stage Gate Review
• Stop the project
• Require changes before it proceeds
• Place the project on hold (very rarely)

In this article, we look at why a stage gate process will enhance your project management, and how to make it work.

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OnlinePMCourses Guide to Project Change Control

There’s one distinctive sign that your project is going well. A stakeholder approaches you in the corridor. ‘We’re very pleased with how your project is going…’ they say. ‘The only thing is… we’ve changed out minds.’ Oh no. This is a job for Project Change Control.

Even on the most traditional of projects, you will need to adapt to changes. They may be driven by technology, commercial opportunities, regulatory changes or a dozen more reasons. Whatever it is, you need to be flexible. And the longer your project, the bigger the need. So it pays to set up a change control process as part of your project set up. This usually happens during the planning stage, and it will serve you well, during your delivery stage.

In this giant guide, we give you everything you need to know to start setting up a robust change control process for your project.

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