Project management phases: from idea to closure

A project is temporary work with a clear result, a deadline and a budget. Temporary means it has a start and an end — that is what sets a project apart from ongoing operations. Almost any project, from a product launch to an office move, goes through five phases. Here is what happens in each and what should come out of it.

1. Initiation: why are we doing this

The aim is to agree that the project is needed at all and to record what the result should be.

Goal and success criteria. Not “roll out the system” but “by 1 March all 40 sales managers run their deals in the system and the report builds itself”.
Scope. What is in the project and, more importantly, what is not.
Stakeholders. Who the customer is, who accepts the result, who the project affects.
Major risks and assumptions already visible.

The output is a project charter: a short document with the goal, deadline, budget, project manager and sponsor. It gives the project manager authority.

2. Planning: how will we do it

The most laborious phase. Here the goal turns into a plan people can work from.

Work breakdown structure (WBS) — splitting the result into phases, work packages and tasks. More in “The work breakdown structure”.
Duration and effort estimates.
Dependencies and the schedule — usually as a Gantt chart.
Resources and owners. Who does each piece of work and whether they are overloaded.
A risk register with responses.
Communication rules: which meetings, which reports, to whom and how often.

The output is the project management plan and the baseline: the approved dates actuals will be compared with. What goes into the plan is in “The project management plan”.

3. Execution: doing the work

The team does the work; the project manager removes obstacles, assigns tasks, resolves issues and keeps stakeholders informed. This is where most of the result appears — and most of the surprises.

A good habit is to keep open issues apart from tasks: each issue has an owner, a due date and a recorded decision. Otherwise decisions get lost in chat threads.

4. Monitoring and control: are we on track

Control runs alongside execution, not after it.

Schedule: forecast against the baseline, milestones and the critical path.
Risks: regular review of the register, new risks, risks that fired.
Changes: every change of scope, date or budget goes through a decision, not “quietly”.
Status: a short regular report — what is done, what is late and why, what decisions are needed.

The output is timely decisions: replan, add people, cut scope or agree a new date.

5. Closure: hand over and learn

A project closes when the result is accepted. In this phase:

the result is formally handed over to the customer or to operations;
contracts are closed and access is removed;
the team holds a retrospective: what worked, what did not, what to take to the next project;
documents and lessons are stored where the next teams will find them.

Closure is often skipped — and the same mistakes repeat on the next project.

Phases don’t always run in sequence

In the classic (waterfall) approach the phases follow one another. In agile approaches planning and execution repeat in short cycles. Even there a project has a start, control and a closure. How to choose an approach is in “Waterfall, Scrum, Kanban and hybrid”.

Where to run it

In Etapero a project has a charter with goals, a work breakdown with a Gantt chart and baseline, a risk register and open issues with decisions, and the portfolio shows every project on one page.