Making Stage Gates Routine

  Decision Making   Risk Management  

The stage-gate process is well known amongst project practitioners. There are many recipes and go-byes, from the unadorned to the intricately crafted. There can be a tendency to treat it as a “necessary evil”—yet another task to check off to get the next piece of funding. The trouble is, a “compliance” mindset often leads to surly box-ticking, the ad-hoc scheduling of a gate review, poor communication and ineffective governance. 

 

It is much better to embrace the stage-gate principles—work with it. And, for a reasonably sized project portfolio, there are benefits in erecting some “scaffolding” to frame how, when and who advances each project in a routine manner. Not only does this grease the wheels and reduce hassle, it leads to better outcomes and a sense that it’s definitely worthwhile.   

 

 

Stage-gate processes allow incremental commitment of resources. They recognize that project risk decreases as definition increases. They also help to advance all of the elements (business, technical, execution) “in line,” as over-defining one item ahead of the rest can lead to confirmation bias of a wrong turn. 

 

Typically, there are variable expectations for the level of definition and approval authority. For projects of …