Stages

What is a Stage?

Stages are checkpoints of the project when decision are made. A stage is a collection of activities and products whose delivery is managed as a unit. As such it is a sub-set of the project, and in PROMISE terms it is the element of work that the Project Manager is managing on behalf of the Project Board at any one time. The use of stages in a PROMISE project is highly recommended, whereas the number of stages is flexible and depends on the needs of the project.

Why are Stages important?

There are various reasons for breaking the project into stages. They include the following.

Review and Decision Points

Within any project there will be key decisions, the results of which will have fundamental effects on the direction and detailed content of the project. There is, thus, a need to review direction and on-going viability on a regular basis.

PROMISE uses stages to deal with these decision points. The decisions form the basis of the End Stage Assessments carried out in Authorising a Stage Plan. The benefits these End Stage Assessments bring to the project are:

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Providing a 'fire break' for the project by encouraging the Project Board to assess the project viability at regular intervals, rather than let it run on in an uncontrolled manner

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Ensuring that key decisions are made prior to the detailed work needed to implement them. The nature of these decisions can be varied and will include:

*         Whether to commit major resources

*         What the impact is of major risk elements

*         The clarification of a previously unknown or ill understood part of the project's direction or products.

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Clarifying what the impact will be of an identified external influence such as the corporate budget or activities in the market, e.g. release of a competitor’s product.

          

Planning Horizons

Uncertainty can often mean that it is only possible to plan in detail the activities and products of a limited amount of the work of the project. The rest of the project's work can only by planned in broad outline. The adoption of stages handles this situation by having two different but related levels of plan, i.e. a detailed Stage Plan and an outline Project Plan.

Scale

Every project should consist of at least two stages. A small project may need only two stages; an Initiation Stage with the remainder of the project as the second stage. The Initiation Stage may last only a matter of hours, but is essential to ensure that there is a firm basis for the project, understood by all parties.

Most projects need to be broken down into more manageable stages to enable the correct level of planning and control to be exercised.

How to Define Stages

The process of defining stages is fundamentally a process of balancing:

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How far ahead in the project it is sensible to plan

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Where the key decision points need to be on the project

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Too many small stages versus too few big ones.

 

This will be a balance of the factors identified above, and will be influenced by any team plans. However, the Project Manager will have to reconcile these two types of plan. This is discussed in the Planning chapter.

How to use Stages

The primary use of stages is as a basis for dictating the timing of the stage transistion processes covered by Stage Transitioning and by the associated Authorising a Stage. These processes are used to make decisions regarding the continuation or otherwise of the project.

One element of this decision-making process is whether the stage that has just completed has completed successfully. This can be problematic where the management stage ends part way through one or more elements of specialist work, since it can be difficult to establish whether the specialist work is under control. This is then a judgement which the board must make.