How Will I Ever Get This Done? A Newbie’s Guide to the Stages of Project Management

Melissa Sutton-Seng

Melissa Sutton-Seng

Project Management

The way the business operations world throws around phrases like project management, process management, task management and can be confusing. Aren’t these all the same thing? On the surface, these terms seem interchangeable, but they aren’t.

Task management is about just that: individual tasks. These can be managed with an app or with a simple, old-fashioned to-do list.

Process management is far more complex. Processes, unlike tasks, have no single completion point because they’re continuous, active parts of your business operations.

But what about project management? Projects have an end date, but they aren’t as predictable as processes, and they’re comprised of multiple tasks, people, and teams. Everyone involved needs transparency on the project so they know what project tasks have been completed and what’s still left to be done.

The Project Management Institute defines project management as “the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements” and identifies five project management stages.

Five Stages of Project Management

Here are the different phases each project usually goes through:

1. Initiation

The first project management phase is initiation. Often considered the most important phase of project management, the initiation phase includes all the preliminary work that must be done before any other project activities can take place. Exactly how many steps are in the initiation phase depends on what sector you’re in and how your team operates.

The essential elements can be roughly divided into four activity categories:

  • Building a business case
  • Conducting feasibility reports
  • Involving stakeholders
  • Creating a PID

Building a business case: This is the why of your project. What’s its purpose and does it make good sense for your business financially as well as in terms of mission, risk assessment, and viable alternatives?

Conducting feasibility reports: Once the business case has been established, conduct a feasibility study to see whether you have the financial and human resources available to complete the project. This is the time to carefully weigh all the pros and cons to see if you should move forward with your project.

Involving stakeholders: Give stakeholders adequate time and information to conduct due diligence. Stakeholders include local governments, community organizations, and other entities that will be impacted by your project. During due diligence, these entities identify potential negative effects of the project, assess whether these effects can be mitigated or avoided, and determine what actions should be taken in relation to those effects.

Creating a PID: The project charter or project initiation document (PID) is a short document that summarizes all the essential information you’ve compiled during the initiation phase. It establishes in writing the scope of the project, its objective, and the people involved. The PID also lists major stakeholders and establishes the authority of the project manager.

2. Planning

In the project planning phase, you flesh out the details of your project.Those details can be divided into four broad categories:

  • Scope
  • Resources
  • Time
  • Communication

Scope: You’ve already defined the scope of your project, but how exactly will you accomplish your vision? What are the individual goals that you must meet to achieve the larger goal defined by your scope? Once those goals are established, delineate the steps necessary to reach each of them, breaking the steps down into tasks and subtasks as necessary.

Resources: What are you working with? Good resource planning means crafting a detailed budget, securing the people needed for the project, and establishing which vendors you’ll be working with.

Time: A detailed timeline is essential to keeping your project on time. Set milestone expectations for each project step and estimate how much time major tasks should take.

Communication:  Establish communication channels and guidelines. What systems will your team use to keep track of progress and keep one another up to date? What are the expectations regarding the frequency and content of communications?

3. Executing

This is the phase most people have in mind when they think of project management. It usually starts with a meeting to officially kick off the project. This is when you share the vision and plan for the project, assign tasks to team members, and send everyone on their way to get things done.

Changes and corrections are almost inevitable. Sometimes these are due to mistakes or unforeseen circumstances and sometimes due to alterations in customer requirements. During the execution phase, it’s important to keep a log of issues and to make updates to your budget and other planning documents as changes occur.

4. Monitoring

It may be a bit counterintuitive to think of monitoring as a separate project management phase because it happens at the same time as the execution phase. Nevertheless, it’s helpful to identify monitoring as its own phase so that it’s not neglected.

During the planning phase, you established key performance indicators (KPIs) in the form of budgets, timelines, and quality expectations. By periodically checking your KPIs, you can catch issues and make corrections quickly.

5. Closing

Closing a project involves obvious steps like delivering the product to customers and submitting final reports. The project manager must ensure that every aspect of the project has been correctly completed, all documents have been updated, and all deliverables have been formally accepted. Projects should only be considered closed when all stakeholders are satisfied as to the successful completion of the project’s objectives.

A project manager will often hold an evaluation meeting to assess the successes and shortcomings of the project and to recognize the contributions of team members. Team members and other resources are released for work on other projects.

How to execute project management stages using Kissflow Projects

Kissflow Projects is built for people who have lots of experience in the business world but aren’t as familiar with project management software. Kissflow Projects uses Value Stream Mapping to create a set of steps that must be completed to move items from Not Started to Completed. Each item moves through a Kanban board and gives all users the flexibility to handle exceptions and quick stages.

In the initiation process management stage, you meet with all the stakeholders to map out what the workflow should look like and what data everyone needs along the way. In planning, you actually build the board and the form and test it.

Execution happens when you are actually working on items and moving them to different steps and stages in the workflow.

Monitoring in Kissflow Projects happens when the project manager takes an overall look at where items are getting stuck. She can also create reports to show how long items take to move to being worked on and how long they take to complete.

Closing happens when items are moved to the Completed state and are finished. Kissflow Projects works best with ongoing or long term projects where items need to be handled in a similar way each time.

Get a handle on all the stages of project management with Kissflow Projects

Project Management can be overwhelming, but hopefully, you feel a bit more able to tackle the job now that you understand the stages of project management. A well-designed project management tool can help you execute well through all the project management phases. If you need a smart, intuitive suite of tools to take your project management to the next level, try Kissflow Projects for free.