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Just about all project management approaches break projects into stages, or you may know them as phases. The four main stages in any project are:

✓ Starting the Project

✓ Organising and Preparing – the project planning

✓ Carrying Out the Work

✓ Closing the Project

Of these stages, the third one – Carrying Out the Work – can repeat, so you can have more than one delivery stage. In a small project, you may decide on a single delivery stage, but in most projects you have several. You can see a project example with two delivery stages in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1: The stages of a project, with two delivery stages.

Breaking a project into stages has many advantages, such as:

✓ Stages allow everyone to concentrate on one part of the work at a time.

✓ By breaking up the detailed planning into convenient blocks, you can plan each delivery stage in detail just before that stage starts, using the latest information.

✓ The sponsor or steering committee can stay in firm control of resources by authorising one stage at a time.

✓ Each stage includes a clear end point, usually called a stage gate (see Chapter 7), for checking that the project is still in control and remains viable.

How many delivery stages should you have? Well, it depends. Delivery stages are not all the same length or timed units of, say, one month. Rather, delivery stages reflect:

✓ Blocks of work that are cohesive and belong together

✓ Amounts of work that the sponsor or steering committee is willing to authorise at a time – the amount may vary at different points in the project according to, for example, the degree of risk in that part of the project

The end of each stage is marked by a stage gate meeting with the sponsor or steering committee. The gate is a useful control point to take stock and check that the project is on track.