Project Management Checklists For Dummies

Chapter 14

Conducting a Stage Gate

In This Chapter

What a Stage Gate is

The importance of Stage Gates in effective project governance

Checklists for Stage Gate meetings

A Stage Gate is a meeting of the Project Steering Group members with the Project Manager at the end of a Delivery Stage. Typically the meeting will be between 45 and 90 minutes long, but erring towards the 45 minutes. The meeting is to check back on the stage just finished, a check on the current state of the whole project and then a look forward to the next stage and check its plan. Figure 14-1 shows the three views of the Stage Gate.

Figure 14-1: The three views at a Stage Gate.

Stage Gates are important, they really are. But along with all other responsibilities of Steering Groups (sometimes known as Project Boards) this has to be one of the worst managed areas in projects. It would be a great kindness to say that Stage Gates are generally done badly because the truth is that they aren’t often done at all – except superficially to make things look good.

The fact is that the work of the Project Steering Group ...