For organizations who invest in capital projects, having tangible or intangible benefits on those investments is a must requirement. Those benefits could be in terms of financial return, improved productivity, reduced waste, socioeconomic benefits, creating new job opportunities, reducing pollution, complying with new rules and regulations, supporting strategic objectives among many others. Having this formal stage gate assessment as an integral part of each capital project is a must but even more true in the post-COVID-19 Virus Era where investing in failed projects should not be permitted anymore.
Enforcing formal stage gate review enables those organizations to implement an effective system for monitoring, evaluating, and reporting anticipated project’s benefits. This requires the stage review to include three types of assessments. The first is the stage deliverables assessment which is what most stage gate reviews will use. This review will ensure that all predefined deliverables for each stage are completed, reviewed, and approved. The second stage gate review is a weighted scoring assessment that partially could be generic for all capital projects but will also include a scoring assessment that is specific for each project. The third and final assessment is a 5-point executive assessment where selected senior stakeholders will score on a scale of 5 points how much they believe that the anticipated project’s benefits are still worthwhile.
Using a Project Management Information System (PMIS) like PMWeb, the three-level stage gate review process comes ready by default. The PMWeb stage gate module will be used to create the project life cycle’s stage gate review which could vary depending on the project’s complexity, value, location, delivery method, among others. The periods for stage gate reviews could exceed the traditional project life cycle phases if needed. For each stage, the list of deliverables needs to be added.
For each defined stage and deliverables with each stage, details should be added to better describe and align them with other related project management processes. For example, each stage and deliverable needs to be associated with the relevant project schedule activity either created in PMWeb or imported from Primavera P6 or MS Project. Other important details include Stage Gate Keeper, WBS Level among many others. PMWeb allows adding all additional user-defined fields needed to manage the project stages and deliverables. Those user-defined fields could be text, dates, numeric, list values, and Boolean.
To enforce governance on deliverables for each stage, it is important to link those deliverables to their data source. Some of the data sources could be PMWeb default modules such as cost estimate, budget, risk register, and commitment contract, while many others could be newly created records using PMWeb visual custom form builder. Those could include the project charter or business case among many others. By adding this link to the relevant record, the stage gate will be automatically updated with the current review and approval workflow status for each deliverable. This will be used to fulfill the first stage gate review requirement which is to confirm that all stage deliverables are completed and approved.
The stage gate scoring will be used to fulfill the requirement of the second stage gate review. PMWeb scoring modules allow the organization to create all needed scoring checklists for stage gates as well as other PMWeb modules that have the scoring option. For each created score checklist, PMWeb allows defining different types of scoring questions. Those could include a list of values, text, numeric, currency, date, attachment, radio buttons, date/time among others. For each scoring item, PMWeb allows defining the available score points and the weight of each score. In addition, fields for notes among others can be also added.
The repository of all created scoring checklists will become available to be assigned to the relevant stage as it is quite possible that the score review for each stage within the same project will differ. For each assessed score item, PMWeb allows capturing the provided answer along with the score value. PMWeb also provides the option to use each scoring item in calculating the stage score value. Usually, this second assessment with specialized technical resources provides the right response for each score question.
The third assessment level, which will be done by the senior executive stakeholders, will be based on a 5-point score where 5 means that the stakeholder strongly believes that the project’s benefits will be attained while a score of 1 will indicate that the stakeholder strongly disbelieves the project’s benefits will be attained. For each provided score, the stakeholder can add comments to explain his/her reason for the provided score. PMWeb will automatically calculate the average weight of the provided score with the option for not selecting some of the provided scores if required.
The data captured in those three assessment levels will provide the project team members, who are responsible for reviewing and approving a stage gate, with the needed content to complete their approval process. The review and approval process tasks will be in accordance with the sequence established in the workflow module. The workflow could include conditions to map the approval authority levels if needed.
The stage gate status report will provide the organization with real-time information to monitor, evaluate and report the performance of each project phase’s deliverables. The form can be designed in the desired form and format to meet the organization’s own reporting requirements.
