Are you one of the growing number of organisations that have or are in the process of implementing a phase-gate process to improve your project benefit realisations? Organisations across all sizes, industries and locations have learnt that one of the best ways to improve benefit realisation it to better manage the flow of their projects using a phase-gate process. This process allows organisations to better manage their risk and investment (time and money) to allow for a greater realisation of project benefits.

The gate processes allows for constant review of a project through the phases which ensures that projects providing the greatest benefits are prioritised and implemented ahead of those with lesser benefits. It also allows projects to be cancelled or placed on hold should the risk and investment start to outweigh the planned benefits.

The use of this type of methodology stretches across all industries and project types as concluded in a study in 2012 by Weyerhauser of companies from the healthcare, software, aerospace, utilities, biotechnology and manufacturing sector which found:

• 61% of the organisations had defined and prescriptive methodologies and the remaining 39% had elements of flexibility within their methodology
• 94% of the methodologies used were developed in-house.
• 100% used defined deliverables for each phase and 94% use specific templates for gate reviews.

A further study by Arthur D. Little found that having a functional phase-gate process adds significantly to the success of product sales in that he concluded that the best 25% of organisations using a phase-gate methodology generate five times more sales from their newly launched projects than the average companies and twelve times more than the worst organisations.

The key to implementing this methodology is to define specific project phases (sometimes also referred to as stages) and then implement a gate at the end of each phase. The phases allow the project to be divided into specific clearly defined phases with each phase containing its own activities and deliverables. The gates separate the phases and the gate allows for a decision point where a project office or steering committee (depending on your chosen governance structure) can make a decision on the way forward of the project based on the information gained during the phases, which is contained in the deliverables presented to the gate.

Good project and portfolio management (PPM) applications should allow for the implementation of these methodologies but it’s most important to ensure that the application you chose should allow for a customisation of the methodology to be applied as it’s clear from the research above that the large majority of implemented methodologies are developed in-house and thus customised to meet the specific needs of the organisation and project office needs.

Are you looking to ensure greater benefits from your project execution? If so, try a free 30-day trial of Project Portfolio Office (PPO) today at www.go2ppo.com/try.php.

PPO is an award winning online project portfolio management and collaboration application. PPO is simple, immediate, secure and affordable. PPO is flexible and can be configured to support any methodology.