When it comes to the new product development process, the expectations from the team are high to achieve the target and introduce a product that can satisfy both consumers and investors. The team of developers must consider a high level of iteration and validation while developing new products. Before jumping from one stage to another, one must apply a middle gate to ensure that the production moves in the correct targeted direction. Thus comes the Stage Gate Process.
Read this article to know more about Stage Gate Process, the different stages involved, and how it can help your product development process. Let’s read.
Stage Gate Process in Project Management: Definition?
The Stage Gate Process, which is also known as the Phase Gate Process, is a project management technique that breaks down projects into different stages with a gate between two stages. The stages in the Stage Gate process are Discover, Scoping, defining Business Case, Application Development, Testing, and Validation, and Launch.
The process breaks up the projects into various stages, and the gates between each stage are the checkpoints. While using this framework, divide your project tasks into various stages as per the milestones and then decide the prerequisites for each stage. It is important to ensure that the project meets these prerequisites before moving to the next stage. The stage gate process is a review and key decision-making part of the project that is useful for large projects with various departments and stakeholders involved.
Stage Gate Process gives an opportunity to key stakeholders to review project progress, make decisions about the viability of the project, and decide whether to proceed further or not.
Stage Gate Process: 6 Stages
There are six different stages in the Stage Gate process, starting with the discovery stage with each stage representing an area of development. Beneath mentioned is the stage gate process:
Stage 1: Discovery
The discovery stage is for project ideation. At this stage, the team does research and sets up a brainstorming session to identify the tasks to be achieved.
Stage 2. Scope
Once you have done research, it’s time to move to the next phase of scoping. Define your project requirements, classify your stakeholders, and establish clear project goals.
Stage 3. Business Case
Next, create a business case to strengthen your project plan and do detailed research to justify your project goals.
Stage 4. Development
The development stage means giving life to your ideas. At this stage, the team creates project deliverables like a product, a report, or a campaign.
Stage 5. Test and Validate
For development, product testing is important to ensure it meets both project goals and industry standards. For projects that don’t include a product, use this stage to polish your deliverables and work upon the areas that need improvement before wrapping up.
Stage 6. Launch
The last stage consists of launching your product or sending deliverables to key stakeholders. Between these stages, there are gates. Gates helps evaluate the progress through each project phase and check whether they are accurate or not based on it.
Between all of these stages, don’t forget the review and decision-making checkpoints. At each of these stages, the possible decisions that can be given are: go (which means go ahead), kill (must end), hold (on the backburner), and recycle (needs revision or further work before moving ahead).
Top Benefits of Stage Gate Process
There are numerous business benefits associated with the phase gate process. Out of many, a few are written below:
Risk Mitigation
The stage gate process keeps all the team members engaged on a single task while removing any kind of unplanned or ad hoc edits to the end product. By having so many stakeholders involved throughout a project lifecycle, preventing any unnecessary deviations lowers risk substantially for big-size organizations.
Better Resource Management
The inbuilt review phases give an opportunity to the team members to redeploy resources in case the project doesn’t meet the requirements. Businesses can allocate tasks to their employees in a more productive way while reducing the wastage of resources.
Project Success
The stage gate process assists employees in working on the right task at the right time. Many times, organizations pitch new clients and take on new projects without an appropriate business case or justification, which results in problems like overspending and vastly increased project scopes. Thankfully stage gate helps solve this problem as it is closely monitored at all stages, ensuring the project meets its critical goals with limited alterations. By regularly assessing the work, issues, and risks, if any, can be highlighted at the earliest.
Flexibility
Due to flexibility, stage gate methodology is adopted by all-size businesses. It can be adjusted under various circumstances within an organization and all-size organizations can deploy a variety of stage gate setups to meet their business requirements. Organizations can begin with a simple model applicable to a particular department or type of project. With time, the model can manage projects with increasing complexity.
Improved Collaboration
Collaborating with large team members working from different locations is quite challenging, but the stage gate process has made it possible. Stage gate process is designed to not just withstand this strain, but to actively manage internal collaborations.
Wrapping Up
Overall, the project’s success rate depends upon employing Stage Gate which is most likely associated with a clear structure and quick elimination of inefficiencies. Streamlined decision-making helps in the effective allocation of resources with maximum efficiency while reducing risks and waste.
Kodehash Technologies offers a variety of project management techniques that are customized uniquely to the businesses’ requirements. Even the straightforward approach can be a lengthy undertaking without the right support. Thus, professional assistance is important for the successful completion of projects.
Request a demo to witness how Kodehash can help your organization with a tailored stage gate process for business requirements.