Stealing a page from the manufacturing sector, more and more property owners, developers and construction professionals are adopting the Stage Gate process to design, develop and manage their projects. The Stage Gate method, first popularized in the 1980s, was originally designed to standardize, and to bring more discipline to, the research and development of new consumer products. Soon, technology leaders such as NASA, General Electric and General Motors adopted Stage Gates too. It was perhaps inevitable that these large, successful manufacturers would adapt the principles of Stage Gate development to effectively design, construct and operate their own infrastructure projects.
What is the Stage Gate Process?
The Stage Gate process is made up of stages and gates:
Stages are comprised of any number of activities which shape and define the project. Stage activities can occur in sequence and/or in parallel, with the goal of creating predefined deliverables.
Gates are evaluation points where the decision is made to continue the project (go) or end it (kill), based on an evaluation of the stage deliverables and other criteria.
The overriding goal of Stage Gate management is to commit fewer resources to the early stages of the process and to rigorously examine the results of each stage to determine whether or not the project should proceed or be stopped. A key component of a gate review is to also evaluate the plan for the next stage. Because the stakes grow exponentially with each successive stage the gate review process necessarily becomes more rigorous and difficult with each step. When properly executed, project leaders are required to actively justify the project at each gate review. Weak projects are identified, adjustments are made to strengthen them and failing projects are canceled or shelved.
PMWeb Stage Gate Management
A prominent feature of PMWeb is Stage Gate Management, which defines, manages and automates the entire Stage Gate process. An unlimited number of stages can be created and each stage can be composed of an unlimited number of activities. Activities can be any project-related task and can be linked directly to other PMWeb records. This means that stage deliverables can be created within PMWeb and the stage is updated in real time as each deliverable develops.
