Aditya works as a Growth Assistant at AirTract, a go-to place for all expert advice wherein people ask questions, write articles, share and learn from paid and free online courses. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science Engineering and has been working in the field of Digital Marketing for the past two years. He is also a voracious reader and a big sports fan.
Project management is the development and execution of a plan related to a specific project that is being carried out. It can be divided into clear stages that you and your team will go through as you take the project from start to finish.
The stages of project management are systematic, step-by-step processes that need to be followed by both managers and leaders to ensure that the project is executed properly and can develop positive results in the future.
The basic efficiency of the project rests within a few proper stages to make organizational project management strong and proficient. These stages can be used as preliminary guidelines to understand the progress report of a certain project.
If you want to ensure your plan stays on track, you’ll need to follow the five stages of project management!
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Summarize this article for me pleaseThe Five Stages of Project Management
According to the Project Management Institute (also known as PMI), Project Management is the knowledge, techniques, skills, and tools that broaden the range of participation and activities of a certain organization to meet the goal of that particular project.
Usually, the controlling and directing process of a project is divided into five basic stages from start to finish. Whether your plan is to launch a new business or to create a marketing plan, every management team goes through these five stages.
Let’s look at these five stages:
- Initiation and conception of the project
- Project planning
- Execution of the project
- Monitoring, controlling and performing of the project
- Project closure
Summarize this article for me pleaseThe Requirement of Project Stages: Critical Opinion
Each project comes with its demands and has a certain route that needs to be followed. Stages of the project lifecycle allow the management team to deal with every project independently and carry it out successfully. Moreover, these stages ensure a systematic operational procedure and maintain the performance of all people involved with the project.
I know you’re thinking, “Is it really important?”
The answer is yes! These five stages are important because they help:
- Make a strategic alignment to deliver the real value of your business or project
- Bring authentic leadership as well as proper direction to your project
- Provide clear focus and objectives regarding your management
- Realistically plan regarding your goal
- Control the quality of the overall outcomes
Let’s learn about these five stages, and how they help your project be successful!
Step 1: Initiation
A concrete initiation will show the pathway to bring success and also lay the foundation of all other stages in its life cycle. First of all, carefully examine the concept and ideas of your project to determine whether the concept is beneficial or not for the organization.
In this phase, the decision-making team will identify a realistic way to complete the whole project. This stage is also known as the formal start, which begins with a project mandate issue. Usually, it describes the primary purpose and aim of the project and also authorizes the project budget.
This stage begins with:
- A proper business case: it justifies the actual need for a project and will set up an estimate regarding potential benefits
- Feasibility study: it assesses the different necessary resources to evaluate the project challenges and determine the essential initiation regarding the benefits of the organization
Project initiation generally requires some key components to undertake a Project Initiation Document (PID), including the following:
- Business case
- Goals and scope of your project
- Project organization
- Project risks
- Project stakeholder opinions
- Reporting and controlling framework, and more
Once you have all of this done, it’s time to plan your project!
Step 2: Planning
The planning stage mainly focuses on the blueprint for a certain project’s goals, budget, and time. This is a roadmap that helps you to go forward and guide the team properly. During this stage, the project manager can bring the employees skill to enhance the productivity of an organization.
The Project Planning stage includes:
- Identifying the exact needs
- Defining the purpose and scope
- Finalize the timeline to deliver the complete outcome
- Organizing a schedule for the proper flow of an organization
- Arranging and assessing the requirements
The planning stage is vital for project management. During this phase, your team will be given a proper roadmap of what a project requires to ultimately achieve success as a team!
So, what’s next? It’s finally time to do the work!
Step 3: Execution
When the team is completely ready to execute or launch the outcomes, the project execution stage helps you to control and manage every project. Use the statuses of your project to keep the flow of work in a proper and organized way. The project manager will require leverage the management and soft skills to motivate the team, enhance the performance level on track, and more.
Project management may need these for the execution stage:
- Creation of individual responsibility and tasks
- Assigning the tasks among the team members
- Executing the assignments
- Update the progress report of your project
- Provide deliverables services or products within deadlines
Some experts say that execution and promotion belong to the same stage one after another.
After completing this phase, you need to help your marketing team show off the work that you’ve done! That may include creating a promotional pack of your deliverable services or products for a trade show. Now your marketing team needs to gather product-related information, prices, and even product photography to promote your products in front of customers.
Now what? You’re done, right?
Hang on! There’s still two more stages!
Step 4: Monitoring and controlling
In this phase, the manager can measure the performance, progress, and deal with several issues that may arise. The monitoring and controlling stage is a project milestone for the overall project management.
There are different Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to monitor the project, such as keeping a well-planned budget, sticking with the promised timeline, delivering the product within the deadline, and more.
The most significant thing is that this stage is easily measurable and consistently used by the management and stakeholders jointly.
Step 5: Project Closure
We have reached the final stage of project management, where you can evaluate how successful your completed project is. This evaluation provides a lesson and evaluates the overall process to improve your next project with more efficiency. It is the final stage of the life cycle of your project management.
[A stepwise project management workflow pattern]
With all these procedures, project management can turn out to be really hectic. This is where project management tools come into play. They help you in planning your project with ease. ClickUp is one such tool that can be a great support.
It is a project management tool with docs, reminders, goals, calendars, and even an inbox. With fully customizable and proprietary features, ClickUp works for teams of all sizes and industries to allow any team to use the same app to plan, organize, and collaborate.
Creating custom views that you can save and share with anyone, as well as workload charts that show what people are working on, make it easy to manage any project.
The process of project management varies from organization to organization; however, those are the traditional components of a successful project. Management teams throughout the world take these five stages of project management to complete their projects with lots of benefits.
Project management doesn’t have to be overwhelming, regardless of the magnitude, as long as you follow the five stages of project management.
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