Five stages of project management
Regarding project management, it is essential to know your task and everyone’s task and purpose, which is working and involving in a project. Project management starts with knowing your goals, how to achieve them, and the resources and paths you need. Starting from the first, project management also lets you know how long it will take to accomplish your goals.
Project management is sometimes done in phases to improve control and quality. This means a large project is broken down into more manageable stages, each with a specific deliverable, and done within a particular sequence. PMP course is a perfect fit for learning project management to enhance your knowledge and skill.
Managing a project is not left-hand; it needs proper planning, execution, and a big team. It consists of five stages, from planning to closure. In the article, you will learn the five stages of project management.
What are the Five stages of Project Management?
The whole team should function as a single organism to create a successful project. Each team member performs their particular functions, but a flawless workflow is almost impossible without a well-organized project manager who would keep all the processes under control. And there are specific steps the project manager follows to facilitate a successful project launch:
There are five essential elements of the project management process that you should adhere to when managing a project. These elements enable you to walk through each project stage and ensure that it’s completed on or before the deadline.
Stage 1: Initiating a Project
It is the first and the earliest stage to begin the project management process. In this stage, you define the project from a broader perspective. This is where you get to research if the project is feasible for your business to proceed with or not.
The main aim of the stage is to gain its overall view, prepare the respective project and start assessing from various standpoints, including the forthcoming workload and budget.
The initiation phase highlights the vision of the project, identifies and then documents what you are planning to achieve, and then receive approvals for the project from stakeholders.
Stage 2: Project Planning
Benjamin Franklin said: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” This statement couldn’t be better if we take into consideration this stage. Efficient planning is key to the success of the future project, and this round presupposes a variety of preparations. First, it’s necessary to define the project’s scope, set goals, and define project success.
Further, it’s required to establish a project development plan, which includes the determination of an approximate deadline, estimation of project cost, and available resources.
During this stage, you plan different tasks and subtasks in a project and identify which resources would be feasible to carry out those tasks. These tasks should be more specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.
And one more thing to be added is that you assemble the team that will run the project and creates a project plan that will be followed throughout the project’s lifecycle.
Project Planning involves:
1. Defining objectives
2. Scheduling tasks
3. Explaining the scope
4. Generating progress reports
Stage 3: Project Execution
All main workflows run during this stage. During this stage, project managers are responsible for creating a clear outline of deliverables, their development, and the completion process. A lot of the activities of the project take place in this stage, such as:
- Update project schedule
- Project task execution
- Setting up tracking systems to monitor the project’s progress
- Project status meetings
- Assign resources to the tasks
It gives the project plan flight and is usually commenced with a “kick-off meeting.”
Stage 4: Project Monitoring
During this project stage, you monitor the progress of the deliverables, track if you are close to them, if your team has managed to deliver the result within the given budget or have they surpassed that, and what’s the performance of the development of the project.
Understand that this stage helps you identify if your efforts were a success or not. You get to see if your project turned out to be a success or not. This stage is vital for a project, just like an execution. Plus, quality deliverables are essential if the quality of delivered work meets expectations.
It coincides with the project execution stage and is continuous throughout the project lifecycle to ensure that the project is progressing according to plan with no issues.
Stage 5: Project Closure
This is the last stage of the project, and it depicts that your team has finally completed the project. You recognize your key players who helped you keep the project on track. This is also the stage where the manager needs to list the activities that didn’t take place and the final budget in the report that didn’t get used so all the stakeholders are clear about what happened during the execution of the project.
The final stage of the project is when project deliverables are presented to the stakeholders, and PM also prepares the final report, evaluating the overall project performance.
The last comes when the project reaches its intended goals, and as a team, the team members and project manager go over how the project went and what steps can be taken to improve the next project.
Over to you
The five stages in project management are crucial because each stage has its own goals and deliveries. Following the five stages becomes easier to control the project and results in quality.
Dividing the project into each stage gives a semblance of predictability. You need a pmp course to learn in-depth about how it works in a project. Simplilearn online education offers pmp course which includes the best practices covered in the 6th edition of the PMBOK guide, which is attached with the latest PMP examination.
Enroll now and kickstart your project manager journey with Simplilearn online education, the world’s number one online Bootcamp.
